# data[].attributes.body
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/07/climate/forests-storms-climate-change.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fclimate&action=click&contentCollection=climate&region=rank&module=package&version=highlights&contentPlacement=2&pgtype=sectionfront

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
In response to the school shooting in Parkland, Florida, last Wednesday that killed 17 people, some conservatives are suggesting that state governments and the federal government take radical action.

They don't mean restoring the Federal Assault Weapons Ban of 1994 (which banned guns resembling the Colt AR-15, similar to the gun used in Parkland and one of the most popular rifles in America) or challenging the National Rifle Association's grip on the conversation about guns and their place in American life.

They mean putting armed drones in schools. Or using Homeland Security technology in schools to create barriers against potential shooters. Or arming retired police and military personnel and putting them in classrooms, or using the same security mechanisms as airports. Or permitting teachers and others to carry concealed weapons in schools.

The horror of what took place at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School is causing a clash of ideals for many on the right, who simultaneously rail against the expansion of the state into the lives of everyday Americans when it comes to say, food stamps or welfare benefits, but who are now voicing support for policies that would bring the "police state" into fifth-grade classrooms.

As a Fox News commentator told Laura Ingraham on The Ingraham Angle on Wednesday, to stop school shootings, "we can harden the target. We can lock down schools. We can have some type of electronic admission. We can have metal detectors. We can make the kids safe so the shooter just can't walk into the school anytime he pleases."

@realDonaldTrump time to consider armed drones at every school in USA. If drones can save lives in middle of Syria, operated by military heroes at Nellis AFB in Las Vegas, then they can be used to protect schools inside USA.
- Wayne Allyn Root (@RealWayneRoot) February 17, 2018

"Security theater" on the right

Wayne Allyn Root isn't just a friend of President Donald Trump and a longtime supporter. He's a former Libertarian Party vice presidential candidate and author of The Conscience of a Libertarian: Empowering the Citizen Revolution with God, Guns, Gold, and Tax Cuts, which makes, according to Amazon, a "passionate case for smaller government" and details how "Americans can take back their country from big government, big unions, big corporations, corrupt politicians, bureaucrats, lawyers and lobbyists." His radio show launched in 2009 as a broadside against "big government."

But Root, a self-described "passionate, committed libertarian," thinks schools should use armed military drones, presumably to take out school shooters before they can kill anyone else.

But the primary purpose of armed drones is to kill people - whether they are the military drones used at Nellis Air Force Base or the drones that will be used at the US military's secret $100 million drone base in Niger. Further, the argument that using armed drones in war zones (or domestically, for that matter) rather than sending in troops "saves" American lives (or anyone else's) is highly debatable.

And that's in regions of countries engaged in years of war like Syria, Yemen, and Iraq - not in American schools. They're not hostile zones rife with al-Qaeda operatives or members of ISIS; instead, they're full of children. To put an armed drone in a school to "protect students" would serve only to terrify them.

Add to that that each armed drone can cost as much as $30,000 per flight hour, and Root's suggestion starts to look not only dangerous to individual lives and the civil liberties of American students, but remarkably impractical.

Bringing airport security to schools, as Geraldo Rivera proposed to Sean Hannity, is also baffling from a conservative point of view. Conservatives have long decried the Transportation Security Administration's ineffectiveness and heavy-handed policies. In 2015, TSA missed 95 percent of weapons and explosives brought through security checkpoints during Homeland Security security tests. As Logan Albright wrote for Conservative Review in July 2017:

The TSA is not about keeping us safe, nor is it about apprehending would-be terrorists. The TSA serves one purpose and one purpose only: To create the illusion of safety, the perception that someone is in charge and taking care of things, even if any sensible person can see that it's all a charade.

Consider also the cost: The annual budget of the TSA, which is chiefly focused on air travel in the United States, is around $7.5 billion. There are just about 15,000 airports in the United States, compared to more than 98,000 public schools alone. The budget, then, for a TSA-style security apparatus for every school in America would be astronomical.

But what about armed guards in every school?

In contrast, the issue with putting armed police or guards in every school isn't that it's impractical. It's that we're already doing it, and it's not working. According to the National Association of School Resource Officers, around 40 percent of public schools in America have at least one full-time or part-time school resource officer (SRO) - a law enforcement officer deployed to work in one or more schools.

That included Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School and every single high school in its district. Most SROs aren't trained to work with children - in fact, just 12 states have laws that specify the training requirements for law enforcement officers working in schools. Some of those trainings involve preparing for a mass shooting; some don't. And the number of confrontations between SROs and students has increased in recent years, with cases of young children handcuffed above the elbow by SROs reaching federal courts.

Even metal detectors intended for use in schools haven't been shown to have a real impact on student safety. A study performed by the Journal of School Health in 2011 found, "Students in schools with metal detectors were just as likely to report victimization as those in schools without metal detectors."

One potential (and more sensible) solution

But many conservatives are thinking of ways to stop school shootings before they start that are more logistically workable (and more constitutionally sound). On Friday, David French of National Review suggested the expansion of the use of gun violence restraining orders. With GVROs, a process could be set in place so that if a parent or close relative felt that a person might be a risk to public safety (or their own), they could petition for a hearing to have that person's access to guns temporarily denied. Florida Sen. Marco Rubio has voiced his support.

California already has such legislation in place.

On the left, the best means to end school shootings and mass shootings of any kind would be to massively limit access to guns and the number of guns any American can own, full stop. But the right finds any effort to curb the Second Amendment, by any means, to be anathema. And yet ironically, as Reason magazine's Robby Soave has pointed out, many conservatives seem all too willing to put the First, Fourth, and Fifth Amendments at risk instead.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
To protect the Second Amendment, conservatives are dumping on the Fourth and Fifth

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
In response to the school shooting in Parkland, Florida, last Wednesday that killed 17 people, some conservatives are suggesting that state governments and the federal government take radical action.

# data[].attributes.headline
New global fund for ending modern slavery

# data[].attributes.subject
New global fund for ending modern slavery

# data[].attributes.body
"Jean Baderschneider, CEO of the new global fund, emphasised the critical role of business: “Modern slavery is a crime of economic opportunity. Addressing it in a sustainable way requires a coherent global strategy and mobilisation of resources commensurate with that strategy. This includes close engagement with the private sector as allies and partners. "

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Leading businessmen, philanthropists and politicians have announced a new global fund for ending modern slavery.

The public-private partnership plans to develop a new $1.5bn (£1.1bn) fund "to coordinate a coherent, global strategy to address modern slavery".

Speaking at the Davos conference in Switzerland, the Thomson Reuters Foundation's CEO Monique Villa, US Senator Bob Corker and Gary Haugen from the International Justice Mission said the Global Fund to End Modern Slavery would be the largest initiative of its kind.

Mr Corker said: "The United States is grateful to join the UK and other governments around the world who are committed to a comprehensive approach to end modern slavery.

"I look forward to engaging other international partners as we embark on what we hope will be a game-changer in this fight."

The project follows a campaign by The Independent, Slaves on our Streets, to eradicate modern slavery, which can involve anything from forced labour to sex trafficking.

In a statement, Jean Baderschneider, CEO of the new global fund, emphasised the critical role of business: "Modern slavery is a crime of economic opportunity. Addressing it in a sustainable way requires a coherent global strategy and mobilisation of resources commensurate with that strategy. This includes close engagement with the private sector as allies and partners.

"We believe that sustainably ending modern slavery will require market-based solutions and proactive business leadership. There is potential for businesses and investors to drive change like we have never seen before."

Meanwhile Ms Villa said: "Effective partnerships are essential to eradicate forced labour.

"The Stop Slavery Award, created by us with Anish Kapoor, is a good example of how bold initiatives are able to galvanise corporate engagement.

"From Adidas to Apple to Walmart, the number of companies applying for the award demonstrates that big corporations are taking action in the fight against slavery and this is very encouraging."

Earlier this month, The Independent reported how widespread use of low cost services such as of cheap car washes or nail bars was fuelling modern slavery in the UK.

Will Kerr, of the National Crime Agency (NCA), said a tendency to opt for low-price goods and services at a time of austerity was allowing criminal gangs who exploit vulnerable people to prosper.

A "significant gap" between public belief that slavery no longer exists, and the "terrible consequences" for victims of modern slavery, is seeing swathes of people used for labour and sex within our communities, he said.

Reuse content

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Millions pledged for largest-ever fund to fight modern day slavery

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Leading businessmen, philanthropists and politicians have announced a new global fund for ending modern slavery. The public-private partnership plans to develop a new $1.5bn (£1.1bn) fund "to coordinate a coherent, global strategy to address modern slavery".

# data[].attributes.body
Is democracy always a force for good? To make important social changes, would a strong leader be a quicker and easier way to achieve them?
Is the aggressive democracy promotion undertaken by the West morally acceptable?

# data[].attributes.body
Fracking is regarded as highly controversial owing to the fact that the U.S. sings its' praises but other country ban the practise or the company faces heavy oppositi

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
What is fracking?Hydraulic fracturing, or fracking as it is better known, is a method of extracting oil and gas trapped in shale and other rock formations.

The modern version involves pumping large amounts of water down a well at high pressure, along with sand and chemicals that make up a tiny fraction of the volume. Together, this "stimulation fluid" fractures the rock and releases the gas or oil, which flows to the surface. The hole drilled for a well is about the size of a manhole cover.

As the UK industry body explains, the sand is there to keep fractures in the rock open. The chemicals are included for several purposes, such as lubrication and keeping bacteria out.

The other big technological development that has made fracking economical is horizontal drilling. This means that several horizontal boreholes can be drilled off one well, like tributaries off a river, maximising the amount of oil and gas that can be recovered. This spring, either Third Energy in North Yorkshire or Cuadrilla in Lancashire will become the first company to frack in the UK since 2011.

Fracking can also be undertaken on a well that has already been drilled and for which conventional techniques were unable to extract more hydrocarbons.

How fracking works graphic

What chemicals are used?
Under UK regulations, operators have to submit a list of the chemicals they will use to the Environment Agency, or they will be refused consent. In the UK, one of the most commonly used chemicals is diluted hydrochloric acid. A government expert told the Guardian that in the case of a leak, the risk from the chemicals used is "very low". In the US, the Environmental Protection Agency found a median of 14 chemicals for each sample it took. The most common were methanol (an alcohol), hydrochloric acid, and hydrotreated light petroleum distillates (a combination of hydrocarbons).

Shale formations will be fractured at depths of more than 1km below the surface in the UK, after new regulations were introduced in 2015. The Kirby Misperton one, for example, is about 3,000m deep.

Who pioneered fracking?
Fracking transformed the US energy landscape, putting the country on course to becoming a net exporter of oil after output declined over the last three decades of the 20th century. That trajectory means it is now starting to create similar shockwaves globally.

The modern version of fracking came of age in the late 1990s, unlocking oil and gas reserves across more than 20 US states. As a result, US oil production has increased faster than at anytime in the country's history, dwarfing the giddy days of the country's black gold rush in the 19th century. About half of US crude now comes from fracking.

The boom has also been a boon for US householders, who have enjoyed falling gas prices to heat their homes and stable wholesale electricity prices. Around two-thirds of the country's gas is produced by fracking.

The US now has so much oil and gas that it has dropped a decades long embargo on exports and is looking to step up shipments.

Dr Fatih Birol, executive director of the International Energy Agency, said the US is on course to become the world's undisputed oil and gas growth story - and it's because of fracking.

"What is happening in the US between now and 2025 [is] a huge expansion of oil production, about 80% of the global oil production growth comes from the US. It exceeds the huge expansion of Saudi Arabia which we witnessed in the 1960s and 70s," he told the Guardian.

Where else is fracking taking place?
For several years, Europe was talked up as a new frontier for shale exploration. Poland was seen as one of the most promising prospects, attracting US companies such as Chevron, ConocoPhillips and Exxon, as Warsaw hoped to ease its reliance on Russian gas. But the geology did not prove as promising as hoped and, one by one, companies pulled out. A similar pattern occurred in Romania.

Global fracking graphic

Other European countries have gone further and banned fracking: France, Germany and Ireland have all imposed moratoriums.

Despite bans in every part of the UK apart from England, the country now stands as one of the last parts of Europe where fracking firms are still actively drilling and hoping to frack.

While no well has been fracked since 2011 due to a moratorium, regulatory changes and planning delays, at least three sites look likely to be fracked in 2018.

But even that new wave of activity looks fragile, with the sector at risk from any change in government. The SNP banned fracking in Scotland, while the 2017 election manifestos of Labour, the Liberal Democrats and Greens all promised fracking bans.

The governing Conservative party still officially backs fracking, but has lately been much quieter in its support, with some MPs even questioning if there is still a need for it, and Conservative-controlled local authorities rejecting shale drilling applications.

The right geology is key to success. The British Geological Survey found the best shale oil prospects are in southern England, in the Weald Basin between the North and South Downs. For gas, the group said the best resource appears to be in the Bowland shale, which stretches beneath much of Lancashire and Yorkshire.

On the other side of the world, the industry has largely stalled in Australia.

Concerns over scarce water supplies have seen five of the country's eight states and territories essentially temporarily banning fracking. The federal government wants to see the bans dropped, but polls have found 49% of Australians support the fracking ban in their state, compared to 24% against it.

Elsewhere in the southern hemisphere, South Africa and Argentina have both been eyed by fracking companies. But, as in many other parts of the world, neither country is yet to see a serious exploration and appraisal phase.

Why is fracking so controversial?
The UK government has repeatedly said that fracking can be done safely and without harming the environment or human health, so long as it is properly regulated. New rules mean that companies have to closely monitor and report seismic activity, as well as potential water and air pollution.

But that's not been the case throughout fracking's history, particularly during some of the 'wild west' years when it grew rapidly in the US.

Water contamination has been one of the biggest environmental concerns and where some of the most egregious incidents have occurred. A years-long piece of research by the US Environmental Protection Agency concluded in 2016 that in some cases fracking had harmed drinking water supplies.

Most of the cases of water pollution in the US have involved boreholes that were not built properly, or mishandling of wastewater. Images of burning taps in the 2010 documentary Gasland arguably turbocharged the anti-fracking movement in the US, even though cases of gas contaminating water supplies have been hard to prove.

What are the other concerns?
Earthquakes caused by hydraulic fracturing have been another big concern. While the two earthquakes in 2011 that led to the UK's fracking moratorium were both ranked minor on the Richter scale, the US has experienced much stronger ones. In Oklahoma, experts have reported a millennium's worth of quakes in two years because of fracking there.

Other local concerns listed by fracking critics include industrialisation of rural areas, noise from lorries and the air pollution impact from flaring, when excess gas is burned off.

The big picture issue, of course, is climate change. Fracking advocates have argued the technology is good for global warming because, at least in the US, gas has been displacing coal in the power mix.

But that coal is usually still burned elsewhere in the world, meaning fracking is simply adding to fossil fuel supplies - and the stock of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

The UK government was warned last year by its climate advisers that, without stricter rules, fracking on a large scale would bust the country's legally-binding carbon targets.

It is this combination of local and global concerns that has galvanised a vocal, well-organised anti-fracking movement, including public figures such as author Naomi Klein and actor Mark Ruffalo.

What does the future hold?
After years of delays, whether fracking in the UK ever takes off remains to be seen, but industry claims America's continued progress will help them. UK-based iGas, which plans to frack one well and drill several others in 2018, told the Guardian it is taking advantage of advances in technology made in the US.

In the short term, fracking looks likely to stay as a largely American story, unless China decides to seriously invest in extracting its vast shale gas reserves, which are estimated to eclipse those in the US.

"What is happening in the US is all driven by the shale revolution," said Birol. That revolution will have profound ramifications around the world for years to come, from Europe's reliance on Russian gas to US foreign policy and headaches for the oil cartel, Opec.
Topics

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Fracking - the reality, the risksand what the future holds

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
What is fracking?Hydraulic fracturing, or fracking as it is better known, is a method of extracting oil and gas trapped in shale and other rock formations. The modern version involves pumping large amounts of water down a well at high pressure, along with sand and chemicals that make up a tiny fraction of the volume.

# data[].attributes.body
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-03-12/australia-is-struggling-to-handle-its-swelling-population/9535116

Recent study on the relationship between Australia's population growth and the required infrastructure. In the 10 year period between 2006-2016 the city of Melbourne grew by ~1 million. Can we afford to allow the human population to grow so rapidly?

# data[].attributes.headline
China has put forward a plan to ban fossil fueled cars. This is something many other countries have talked about as well including France and Sweden. Is this a good solution? 

# data[].attributes.subject
China has put forward a plan to ban fossil fueled cars. This is something many other countries have talked about as well including France and Sweden. Is this a good solution? 

# data[].attributes.body
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/sep/11/china-to-ban-production-of-petrol-and-diesel-cars-in-the-near-future

# data[].attributes.body
Very controversial topic discussing a news article regarding President Trump filling his administration with people that share his disbelief in the scientific evidence of climate change.

Climate change skeptics generally fall into the following categories:
1. Those that question accuracy of IPCC climate projections.
2. Scientists that argue CC is primarily caused by natural processes.
3. Scientists that argue the cause of global warming is unknown
4. Those that argue that global warming will have few negative consequences.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
President Donald Trump is filling the upper ranks of his administration with appointees who share his disbelief in the scientific evidence for climate change - giving them an opportunity to impose their views on policies ranging from disaster planning to national security to housing standards.

At the Interior Department, decisions about Pacific island territories threatened by rising seas are in the hands of an assistant secretary who has criticized "climate alarmists" for "once again predicting the end of the world as we know it." Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue's top advisers include a former talk radio host who has dismissed much climate research as "junk science." Trump's nominee to head research and technology at the Department of Transportation claimed three years ago that global warming had "stopped" - a position at sharp odds with the findings of federal agencies like NASA.

Story Continued Below

Trump has chosen at least 20 like-minded people to serve as agency leaders and advisers, according to a POLITICO review of his appointees' past statements on climate science. And they are already having an impact in abandoning former President Barack Obama's attempt to help unite the world against the threat of rising sea levels, worsening storms and spreading droughts.

By signing up you agree to receive email newsletters or alerts from POLITICO. You can unsubscribe at any time.

Most famously, the president and his team have scrubbed mentions of climate change from government websites, kicked scientists off advisory boards, repudiated the Obama administration's greenhouse gas regulations and made the U.S. the only nation on Earth to reject the 2015 Paris agreement on global warming.

More quietly, Trump's White House excluded rising temperatures from the list of threats in its December national security strategy, contradicting the approach of both the Obama and George W. Bush administrations. Last year, just before Hurricane Harvey drowned Houston, the White House rescinded requirements that projects built with federal dollars take into account the way warming temperatures might intensify extreme weather.

People worried about the consequences of climate change say a government that denies the problem is courting danger.

"The analogy could be if somebody's got a heart problem or high cholesterol, you take medicine that helps manage that so you can avoid a heart attack," said Ana Unruh Cohen, the government affairs director at the Natural Resources Defense Council. "Trump taking that away, saying, 'Forget it, I don't believe I have high cholesterol,' is setting up the country for a heart attack."

Aparna Mathur, a resident scholar in economic policy at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, found the trend worrying as well.

Many administration officials "don't seem to believe climate change is real, or if they believe climate change is real, there's this sort of attitude that there's not much to do about it or it's not caused by human actions," said Mathur, whose AEI colleagues also include people who question the extent of man-made climate change. As a result, she said, the U.S. is falling behind countries that are taking action on the problem.

The doubts are coming from both prominent and little-known Trump appointees, in ways both obscure and subtle.

Some have expressed doubt that the Earth is warming at all, speculated that the trend might be good for humans, or said it's just impossible to know how much of a role humans and their pollution are playing. All these statements fly in the face of findings by the government's own research agencies and the vast majority of climate scientists.

"There are scientists that think lots of different things about climate change," then-Rep. Mike Pompeo (R-Kan.), now Trump's CIA director, said on C-SPAN in 2013. "There's some who think we're warming, there's some who think we're cooling, there's some who think that the last 16 years have shown a pretty stable climate environment." Pompeo dodged the issue in his confirmation hearing last year, saying he would "prefer today not to get into the details of the climate debate and science."

When he was running for president, HUD Secretary Ben Carson scoffed at the idea that strong evidence for human-caused climate change even exists. "I know there are a lot of people who say 'overwhelming science,' but then when you ask them to show the overwhelming science they never can show it," he told the San Francisco Chronicle in 2015.

Few have been as publicly outspoken on the issue as Trump, who more than once has dismissed human-caused climate change as a "hoax" and claimed in January that polar ice isn't melting.

The White House sought to strike a somewhat more moderate tone in a statement to POLITICO on Monday, which said that "the climate has changed and is always changing. The Administration supports rigorous scientific analysis and debate." The statement from principal deputy press secretary Raj Shah added that "the development of modern and efficient infrastructure ... will reduce emissions and enable us to address future risks, including climate related risks."

Some of the administration's climate skeptics have already come and gone.

Former HHS Secretary Tom Price, who had criticized the " allegedly 'settled science' of global warming" as a member of Congress, resigned in September amid criticism of his expensive travels ongovernment and private planes. Kathleen Hartnett White, Trump's pick to head the White House Council on Environmental Quality, withdrew her nomination earlier this year after she stirred criticism with a long list of controversial statements, including calling the human role in climate change "very uncertain."

Another unsuccessful nominee, former talk radio host and political science professor Sam Clovis, had to pull out of the running to be USDA's chief scientist after critics noted that he has no science credentials - but he remains a top adviser to Perdue. Clovis dismissed much climate research as "junk science" in a 2014 interview, adding that "a lot of this global warming ... is really about income redistribution from rich nations that are industrialized to nations that are not."

Brent Fewell, a conservative environmental lawyer who was an EPA water official under Bush, suggested that some of these officials may privately acknowledge that man-made climate change is real. But he added: "A lot of people on the political right are uninformed about the issue. For whatever reason, it's a lot easier to simply agree with the prominent voices in the political party."

The upshot is the same, however: a 180-degree reversal from Obama's efforts to make the U.S. a leader in addressing the causes and consequences of a warming planet.

The EPA is leading the charge by withdrawing or weakening a host of climate regulations, including a 2015 rule that would have sped the electric power industry's shift away from coal-fired energy. Trump has also approved tariffs for solar panel imports, which will make it harder for green energy to compete with fossil fuels. Agencies have sought to cancel rules meant to limit the oiland gas industry's methane pollution - another major greenhouse gas source - and are reconsidering tougher standards for vehicles, too.

The Energy Department has proposed regulatory changes to prop up coal plants that can't compete in the market, while the White House is seeking buyers for U.S. coal and gas exports.

When Trump's critics seek to challenge these actions in court, the government's defense will be run by the Justice Department - an agency whose leader, Attorney General Jeff Sessions, said during a 2015 Senate hearing that carbon dioxide is "really not a pollutant."

"It's a plant food, and it doesn't harm anybody except that it might include temperature increases," Sessions said.

Some agencies are still continuing to study climate change and factor their findings into their policy decisions. But even there, career staffers may not talk about their work as openly as they once did, and the agencies seldom showcase it the way they did during the Obama years.

Much of the alarm among Trump's critics focuses on EPA, which has replaced dozens of scientists on its key advisory boards with industry or state representatives, and has found other ways to keep researchers from contradicting the administration's message. Last fall, the agency canceled an appearance by three EPA scientists scheduled to speak about climate change at a Narragansett Bay conference. Both EPA and the Energy Department have given extra scrutiny to grant proposals with the words "climate change," and in the case of EPA, it has put a political appointee in charge of signing off on them, The Washington Post has reported.

All this is in line with the public statements of EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt, who has suggested that global warming might be a good thing and has spoken about holding a public debate on whether climate change is real.

"Right out of the gate ... the administration took any and all mention of climate change off of the White House website," said Jacob Carter, a research scientist who has been tracking the administration's treatment of science for the Union of Concerned Scientists. "It seems like the administration is really trying to undo a lot of the scientific process as a whole and get experts out of the way."

The Environmental Data and Governance Initiative, which has studied the purging and rewording of climate-related documents on government websites, reported at the end of 2017 that it had found a "significant loss of public access to information about climate change."

The State Department's website took down links related to the Paris climate agreement, EPA removed a student's guide to climate change, and the Energy Department got rid of the words "clean energy" on a page with information for investors and businesses looking for projects with national laboratories.

The Interior Department's Bureau of Land Management, which oversees energy development on federal land, cut text about the effects of climate change. Some of the resources are still technically available in archives or in new locations, but they are harder to find because the government sites don't directly link to them, the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative says.

"It's not alarming the public because it's very hard to see each incremental thing," said Andrew Bergman, a co-author of the report.

Some Trump appointees have downplayed the idea that agency leaders' personal views about climate change are critical to making policy, suggesting they can still respond to global warming's effects without addressing why it's happening.

"We continue to take seriously climate change - not the cause of it, but the things that we observe," Tom Bossert, the president's homeland security adviser, told reporters after last year's spree of catastrophic hurricanesthat ravaged Houston, Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands.

Sarah Hunt, who works in energy policy at the conservative American Legislative Exchange Council, said that "policymaker views on climate science needn't have any bearing on their support for conservative clean energy policies that spur the innovation we need to reduce emissions and promote environmental stewardship while we grow our economy."

But Trump's actions have reflected his views on the science. For example, one of his early executive ordersin March 2017 eliminated a number of ways agencies had been required to consider climate change, including in environmental reviews for infrastructure projects.

Because so many of his appointees have questioned the conclusions of climate scientists, they are jettisoning climate change from routine processes. Those include EPA's refusal to consider the global monetary benefits of curbing rising temperatures when it rolled back Obama-era rules for the power sector.

Still, some agencies have continued to issue major reports that warn that climate change is a real and growing problem - even as the president's staffers push the message that the science is uncertain.

In November, the government's 13-agency National Climate Assessment concluded that humans have pushed global temperatures to their highest level in modern times.In January, NASA published data showing that last year was the second-warmest on record, and noted that temperature rises are "driven largely by increased carbon dioxide and other human-made emissions into the atmosphere."

Trump's nominee to run the space agency, Rep. Jim Bridenstine (R-Okla.), criticized "climate change alarmists" on the House floor in 2013 and claimed that "global temperatures stopped rising 10 years ago." (In fact, they haven't.) At his confirmation hearing last year, he acknowledged that humans are a cause of climate change but wouldn't call them the main cause.

"That is a question that I do not have an answer to," he said.

This article tagged under:

Missing out on the latest scoops? Sign up for POLITICO Playbook and get the latest news, every morning - in your inbox.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Climate change skeptics run the Trump administration

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
President Donald Trump is filling the upper ranks of his administration with appointees who share his disbelief in the scientific evidence for climate change - giving them an opportunity to impose their views on policies ranging from disaster planning to national security to housing standards.

# data[].attributes.body
There are many reasons people want to live closer to their city centers, from being able to bike and walk work, to preferring a closer proximity to independent businesses. While these are valid reasons and often based on desires to live more sustainably and environmentally friendly, there is also a downside to the influx of money into urban areas. Gentrification is a huge global problem in most all metropolitan areas that is perpetuating cycles of income inequality, environmental racism, barriers to housing and education, and much more. Is the trade off worth it? https://whyy.org/articles/slums-sleek-towers-philly-became-cleaner-safer-unequal/

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
It's not "90210," the TV series about the swanky Beverly Hills neighborhood, but the rich are definitely pouring into another Los Angeles zip code: 90014. That neighborhood is now America's "most gentrified" zip code in the country, even though it's next to the city's Skid Row.

"With a 95 percent increase in median household income, it took first place," according to a survey from apartment search website RENTCafé. Yet, it added, "the majority of residents still live under the poverty line."

The study underscores how rising property prices are pushing professionals into poorer neighborhoods, creating a cycle that can lead to disgruntled neighbors with fears that gentrification will price them out of their homes.

RENTCafé analyzed Census and economic data dating back to the turn of the century to find the 20 zip codes with the highest growth in home value, household income and education. All of the neighborhoods are formerly rundown areas of major cities where wealthy and upper-middle class young professionals have moved in, displacing or, at the very least, squeezing the less affluent and often minority residents.

"Gentrification," a term that comes from the English word for landowners just below the nobility, is often vilified by activists as a way to push black people from their neighborhoods. The survey's author, Balazs Szekely, said that gentrifiers are a "less than glorious elite, if you will."

Young urban professionals, often without children, don't see it that way. Many work in major cities and want to live close to their jobs. For example, one such gentrified area in Philadelphia sits next to city hall. Even with the recent rise in home prices, renovated downtown properties are still considered a bargain by some homebuyers, as well as a way to avoid the traffic jams they would endure if they commuted to the suburbs.

Even so, these inner-city properties are less affordable than they once were. On an inflation-adjusted basis, the cost of a home in the Los Angeles 90014 zip code has skyrocketed from $52,275 in 2000 to $421,731 in 2016, a 707 percent increase. Average income in the area has nearly doubled, yet it stands at $24,670, according to the survey. That means wealthier residents are often living side-by-side with lower income Americans, who are often renters.

With the exception of St. Louis, Missouri, all of the most gentrified neighborhoods are located on the East and West coasts or in Texas. The biggest migration of gentrifiers can be found in New York City's borough of Brooklyn, just across the East River from Manhattan, which claims five of the zip codes.

Two of the most gentrified zip codes are in Manhattan. One encompasses a Harlem neighborhood that was traditionally African-American, while another sits next to Yankee Stadium in the Bronx. Washington, D.C., Philadelphia and Houston each claim two of the most gentrified zip codes.

"Neighborhoods have been targeted by vandals who oppose gentrification," noted Phillyvoice.com. But city leaders typically like the economic changeover because it increases the tax base, and often do everything they can to improve these downtown areas.

Tacoma, the only city in Washington state to crack the top 20, cleaned up its nearby waterway and put in a light rail system that residents could walk to, according to The News Tribune. Short commute times are also a draw.

"What our top 20 'zips' have in common is that they are central, highly coveted mostly downtown neighborhoods where development options are limited," said Szekely. Because more people are vying for fewer homes, "the result is a snowball effect." While gentrification replaces long-time residents, it also "revives neighborhoods that have seen better days," he added.

The pioneers who often brought about gentrification were artists and LGBT families seeking a cheaper way to enjoy city life. Many of the gentrified areas are near museums, theater districts, universities and elegant restaurants.

The trend could very well continue because - realistically - people have no choice but to go where the jobs are. And about 90 percent of US gross domestic product (GDP) comes from metropolitan areas, according to a study by the St. Louis Federal Reserve. It is also where 86 percent of the population live, although, judging by the gentrification study, many of them would like to live even closer.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Where gentrification is having the biggest impact on cities

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
It's not "90210," the TV series about the swanky Beverly Hills neighborhood, but the rich are definitely pouring into another Los Angeles zip code: 90014. That neighborhood is now America's "most gentrified" zip code in the country, even though it's next to the city's Skid Row.

# data[].attributes.body
Gene-editing technologies bring about great potential, but like most other technologies they bring about equal risks. There is a debate over the use of tampering with DNA of any life forms. On the one side you have propontents of technologies such as CRISPR/Cas9 and Gene Drives, envisioning a world where these technologies help to cure cancer, eliminate malaria, resuscitate mammoths, and make beer more potent. On the other side you have those who oppose such technologies as the risks of unintended consequences are too complex and perhaps freightening, and some that are sceptical about one of the main investors in this technology is the US Army.

A debate arguing the ethical implications of utilizing such technologies, mainly on human embryos (creating "perfect babies") is also prevalent.
https://www.wired.com/2017/06/crispr-mutations/
https://www.wired.com/2017/05/jennifer-doudna-what-crispr-can-do/
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/embryo-gene-editing-experiment-reignites-ethical-debate/
https://www.nature.com/news/gene-drive-mosquitoes-engineered-to-fight-malaria-1.18858

# data[].attributes.headline
H&M factory in Ethiopia. Wages do not live up to the “living wage” 

# data[].attributes.subject
H&M factory in Ethiopia. Wages do not live up to the “living wage” 

# data[].attributes.body
H&M replies that they are taking part of ILO study which aims to give governments directions to support future salary laws and regulations.
Is it right that an actor as H&M establishing themselves in a country and then try to act for change?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
by Engidu Woldie
ESAT News (February 27, 2018)

The Swedish clothing giant, H&M, has faced another scandal, this time in Ethiopia.

The manufacturing giant has reportedly found to have been paying Ethiopian employees meager salaries that led to its financier Nordea Bank AB to hold its funds and put the clothes under the so-called "freezer box," according to an investigative report by the Swedish public television, SVT.

"It's unimaginable that these people get so little paid. I've been to Ethiopia myself and I'm hard to imagine that these people can live on their pay. And that's the whole sector and in many other markets too," says Sasja Beslik, Sustainability Manager, SVT News.

Sasja Beslik believes that wages of just under two krona (under 0.24 ¢) per hour at the in H&M's supplier factory in Hawassa - do not live up to the "living wage" requirement anywhere in the world, according to the report.

"Generally, the people in this sector are terribly poorly paid. I usually describe the industry as a "sustainability bomb" - there are huge challenges regarding both the environment, water use and wages and conditions in the factories," says Sasja Beslik.

H&M had built two factories in Ethiopia, in Hawassa and Mekelle. The report by the Swedish television say the employees at the Hawassa factory are paid 36.6 USD per month. The factories hire about 4000 employees. Swedfund that granted 15.2 million dollar loans to a Bangladeshi company - DBL - which is building a new textile factory.

After SVT's exposé of extremely low wages at one of H&M's supplier factories in Hawassa, Ethiopia, Nordea has paused all possible new investments in H&M, the report said.

The manufacturing giant came under attack last month for featuring a black child dressed in a sweatshirt emblazoned with the words "coolest monkey in the jungle" on the front. It drew condemnation and boycott by Hollywood stars, including pop icon of Ethiopian descent, Abel Tesfaye, The Weekend.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
by Engidu Woldie ESAT News (February 27, 2018) The Swedish clothing giant, H&M, has faced another scandal, this time in Ethiopia. The manufacturing giant has reportedly found to have been paying Ethiopian employees meager salaries that led to its financier Nordea Bank AB to hold its funds and put the clothes under the so-called "freezer box," according to an investigative report by the Swedish public television, SVT.

# data[].attributes.body
Is this a more sustainable and ethical choice that is going to replace agriculture in the future? What about vs plant based meats?

http://www.bbc.com/news/av/technology-40496863/lab-grown-meat-the-future-of-food

# data[].attributes.body
"It is important that Swedish authorities do their part and signal that child marriage is not legal so that children don't risk being forced into marriages on their way here,".

Since the migration crisis in 2015 the number of children in marriage has increased in Sweden. There are different views on how this should be handled.

http://sverigesradio.se/sida/artikel.aspx?programid=2054&artikel=6348105

https://www.thelocal.se/20171206/sweden-to-crack-down-on-child-marriages

# data[].attributes.body
Elon Musk is a strong proponent of moving humans permanently to Mars. I don't think many people disagree with this. But many are opposed to funneling resources into this while the Earth still has many problems, like climate change and poverty. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/mar/11/elon-musk-colonise-mars-third-world-war

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Elon Musk: we must colonise Mars to preserve our species in a third world war

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Founder of SpaceX, which is working on getting humans to the planet, speaks at SXSW amid rising nuclear tension

# data[].attributes.body
"Governments have been underestimating methane emissions from gas and must phase out the fossil fuel, along with coal and oil, by 2035 to keep within Paris climate targets, a major study shows"

At the same time are EU funding new gas infrastructure in Europe with billions of euro, of public money. This will lock Europe in to antoher 40-50 years of dependence on fossil gas, so much longer then 2035.

People advocationg for fossil gas means that it emits less CO2 then coal and gas. Therefore, they aregue that it is a clean transition fuel to renewables.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/nov/07/natural-gas-emissions-will-blow-europes-carbon-budget-at-current-levels

# data[].attributes.headline
Why paying mothers more could fix the gender pay gap

# data[].attributes.subject
Why paying mothers more could fix the gender pay gap

# data[].attributes.body
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/02/how-better-maternity-pay-can-fix-the-gender-pay-gap-and-boost-productivity

# data[].attributes.headline
Should gene editing be performed on human embryos? 

# data[].attributes.subject
Should gene editing be performed on human embryos? 

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
On November 25, 2018, geneticist He Jiankui of China's Southern University of Science and Technology announced that his lab had successfully used the Crispr-Cas9 gene-editing system to make the world's first genetically edited human babies. Outside scientists haven't verified his claims, and his home university is planning to investigate him for academic violations. But if the results hold, the experiment would mark a scientific milestone- and raise profound ethical issues. In the August 2016 issue of National Geographic magazine, we invited contributors to weigh the ethics of making edits to the human genome that future generations would inherit.

Pro: Research on Gene Editing in Humans Must Continue
By John Harris
John Harris is professor emeritus in science ethics at University of Manchester, U.K., and the author of How to be Good, Oxford University Press 2016.

In February of this year, the Human Fertilization and Embryology Authority in the United Kingdom approved a request by the Francis Crick Institute in London to modify human embryos using the new gene editing technique CRISPR-Cas9. This is the second time human embryos have been employed in such research, and the first time their use has been sanctioned by a national regulatory authority. The scientists at the Institute hope to cast light on early embryo development-work which may eventually lead to safer and more successful fertility treatments.

The embryos, provided by patients undergoing in vitro fertilization, will not be allowed to develop beyond seven days. But in theory-and eventually in practice-CRISPR could be used to modify disease-causing genes in embryos brought to term, removing the faulty script from the genetic code of that person's future descendants as well. Proponents of such "human germline editing" argue that it could potentially decrease, or even eliminate, the incidence of many serious genetic diseases, reducing human suffering worldwide. Opponents say that modifying human embryos is dangerous and unnatural, and does not take into account the consent of future generations. Who is right?

Let's start with the objection that embryo modification is unnatural, or amounts to playing God. This argument rests on the premise that natural is inherently good. But diseases are natural, and humans by the millions fall ill and die prematurely-all perfectly naturally. If we protected natural creatures and natural phenomena simply because they are natural, we would not be able to use antibiotics to kill bacteria or otherwise practice medicine, or combat drought, famine, or pestilence. The health care systems maintained by every developed nation can aptly be characterized as a part of what I have previously called "a comprehensive attempt to frustrate the course of nature." What's natural is neither good nor bad. Natural substances or natural therapies are only better that unnatural ones if the evidence supports such a conclusion.

The matter of consent has been raised by Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health. "Ethical issues presented by altering the germline in a way that affects the next generation without their consent," he has said, constitute "strong arguments against engaging in" gene editing.

This makes no sense at all. We have literally no choice but to make decisions for future people without considering their consent. All parents do this all the time, either because the children are too young to consent, or because they do not yet exist. George Bernard Shaw and Isadora Duncan knew this. When, allegedly, she said to him "why don't we make a baby together ... with my looks and your brains it cannot fail" she was proposing a deliberate germline determining decision in the hope of affecting their future child. Shaw's more sober response-"Yes but what if it has my looks and your brains!"-identifies a different possible, but from the child's perspective equally non-consensual, outcome. Rightly, neither Shaw nor his possible partner thought their decision needed to wait for the consent of the resulting child.

Needless to say, parents and scientists should think responsibly, based on the best available combination of evidence and argument, about how their decisions will affect future generations. However, their decision-making simply cannot include the consent of the future children.

Finally, there's the argument that modifying genomes is inherently dangerous because we can't know all the ways it will affect the individual. But those who fear the risks of gene editing don't take into account the inherent dangers in the "natural" way we reproduce. Two-thirds of human embryos fail to develop successfully, most of them within the first month of pregnancy. And every year, 7.9 million children-6 percent of total births worldwide-are born with a serious defect of genetic or partially genetic origin. Indeed so risky is unprotected sex that, had it been invented as a reproductive technology rather than found as part of our evolved biology, it is highly doubtful it would ever have been licensed for human use.

Certainly we need to know as much as possible about the risks of gene-editing human embryos before such research can proceed. But when the suffering and death caused by such terrible single-gene disorders as cystic fibrosis and Huntington's disease might be averted, the decision to delay such research should not be made lightly. Just as justice delayed is justice denied, so, too, therapy delayed is therapy denied. That denial costs human lives, day after day.

Con: Do Not Open the Door to Editing Genes in Future Humans
By Marcy Darnovsky
Marcy Darnovsky, Ph.D., is executive director of the Center for Genetics and Society. She speaks and writes on the politics of human biotechnology.

The gene editing tool known as CRISPR catapulted into scientific laboratories and headlines a few short years ago. Fast on its heels came the reemergence of a profoundly consequential controversy: Should these new techniques be used to engineer the traits of future children, who would pass their altered genes to all the generations that follow?

This is not an entirely new question. The prospect of creating genetically modified humans was openly debated back in the late 1990s, more than a decade and a half before CRISPR came on the scene and several years before the human genome had been fully mapped.

It wasn't long before we saw provocative headlines about designer babies. Princeton mouse biologist Lee Silver, writing in Time magazine in 1999, imagined a fertility clinic of the near future that offered "Organic Enhancement" for everyone, including people with "no fertility problems at all." He even wrote the ad copy: "Keep in mind, you must act before you get pregnant. Don't be sorry after she's born. This really is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for your child-to-be."

During the same millennial shift, policymakers in dozens of countries came to a very different conclusion about the genetic possibilities on the horizon. They wholeheartedly supported gene therapies that scientists hoped (and are still hoping) can safely, effectively, and affordably target a wide a range of diseases. But they rejected human germline modification-using genetically altered embryos or gametes to produce a child-and in some 40 countries, passed laws against it.

The issue of human germline modification stayed on a slow simmer during the first decade of the 21st century. But it roared to a boil in April 2015, when researchers at Sun Yat-sen University announced they had used CRISPR to edit the genomes of nonviable human embryos. Their experiment was not very successful in technical terms, but it did focus the world's attention.

In December 2015, controversy about using CRISPR to produce children was a key agenda item at the International Summit on Human Gene Editing organized by the national science academies of the United States, the United Kingdom, and China. Nearly every speaker agreed that at present, making irreversible changes to every cell in the bodies of future children and all their descendants would constitute extraordinarily risky human experimentation. By all accounts, far too much is unknown about issues including off-target mutations (unintentional edits to the genome), persistent editing effects, genetic mechanisms in embryonic and fetal development, and longer-term health and safety consequences.

Conversations about putting new gene editing tools into fertility clinics need to begin with an obvious but often overlooked point: By definition, germline gene editing would not treat any existing person's medical needs. At best, supporters can say that it might re-weight the genetic lottery in favor of different outcomes for future people-but the unknown mechanisms of both CRISPR and human biology suggest that unforeseeable outcomes are close to inevitable.

Beyond technical issues are profound social and political questions. Would germline gene editing be justifiable, in spite of the risks, for parents who might transmit an inherited disease? It's certainly not necessary. Parents can have children unaffected by the disease they have or carry by using third-party eggs or sperm, an increasingly common way to form families. Some heterosexual couples may hesitate to use this option because they want a child who is not just spared a deleterious gene in their lineage, but is also genetically related to both of them. They can do that too, with the embryo screening technique called pre-implantation genetic diagnosis (PGD), a widely available procedure used in conjunction with in vitro fertilization.

PGD itself raises social and ethical concerns about what kind of traits should be selected or de-selected. These questions are particularly important from a disability rights perspective (which means they're important for all of us). But screening embryos for disease is far safer for resulting children than engineering new traits with germline gene editing would be. Yet this existing alternative is often omitted from accounts of the controversy about gene editing for reproduction.

It is true that a few couples-a very small number-would not be able to produce unaffected embryos, and so could not use PGD to prevent disease inheritance. Should we permit germline gene editing for their sake? If we did, could we limit its use to cases of serious disease risk?

From a policy perspective, how would we draw the distinction between a medical and enhancement purpose for germline modification? In which category would we put short stature, for example? We know that taller people tend to earn more money. So do people with paler skins. Should arranging for children with financially or socially "efficient" varieties of height and complexion be considered medical intervention?

Think back to the hypothetical fertility clinic offering "Organic Enhancement" as a "once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for your child-to-be." Think back to the 1997 movie Gattaca, about a society in which the genetically enhanced-merely perceived to be biologically superior-are born into the physical reality of those whom we might now call the one percent. These are fictional accounts, but they are also warnings of a possible human (or not so human) future. The kinds of social changes they foresee, once set in motion, could be as difficult to reverse as the genetic changes we're talking about.

In opening the door to one kind of germline modification, we are likely opening it to all kinds. Permitting human germline gene editing for any reason would likely lead to its escape from regulatory limits, to its adoption for enhancement purposes, and to the emergence of a market-based eugenics that would exacerbate already existing discrimination, inequality, and conflict. We need not and should not risk these outcomes.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Pro and Con: Should Gene Editing Be Performed on Human Embryos?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
On November 25, 2018, geneticist He Jiankui of China's Southern University of Science and Technology announced that his lab had successfully used the Crispr-Cas9 gene-editing system to make the world's first genetically edited human babies. Outside scientists haven't verified his claims, and his home university is planning to investigate him for academic violations.

# data[].attributes.body
For those of you who are not aware of it, Canada's Province of Québec is the only French speaking territory in North America, and there is a big language debate about French and culture preservation in the Province. Here is an article highlighting this very situation, where Adidas store manager speaking exclusively in English during a pre-media event sparked off another debate about the language of the workplace in Québec.
http://nationalpost.com/news/canada/adidas-kicks-up-language-scrap-with-unacceptable-downplaying-of-french-at-montreal-store-opening

# data[].attributes.body
Most of today's environmental and social problems are because of our current neoliberal system ....one of the most popular options against this has been the concept of Degrowth, this implies deglobalising as well, which might intrinsically imply nationalism.
There's a strong debate around this and what deglobalisation and demilitarizing a country means....globalisation has been one of the main events that has helped prevent wars

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The ideas of a Degrowth-oriented society are a crude mixture of environmentalism and National Socialism - says German journalist Stefan Laurin in a recent blog article. Laurin, who is writing for German outlets like the conservative high-brow magazine ' Cicero' as well as the left-wing ' Jungle World', focuses his critique on Niko Paech, German economist and Degrowth researcher. It was Paech who introduced the Degrowth debate to Germany by translating the French 'Décroissance' into ' Postwachstumsökonomie '. Laurin takes on Paech and his writings, placing him in close proximity to ethnopluralism - the right-wing concept of racism without races, focused on keeping cultures separated from each other in order to maintain their 'original' form - and Walther Darré, the Nazi's agrarian minister affiliated with the Nordic Ring and author of 'Blood and Soil'. After reading Laurin's article you start wondering what just has happened.

Laurin starts off with a more tuned down critique of Paech and his ideas on Degrowth, that center around a reduction of working hours to 20/20, meaning that people would be working 20 hours a week in a reduced sphere of industrial production and market provision of services, while spending the other 20 hours in various forms of community and neighbourhood services outside of the market. The initial critique of Laurin aims at the success story of economic growth in the past 40 years, how much it raised incomes and lifted people across the globe out of poverty. The notion of Degrowth, according to Laurin, is then only attractive to over-saturated high-income societies, a luxury for people wanting to 'decelerate' themselves: an ascetic ethics for people already having more than enough. From this critique, that is quite commonly levelled against notions of Degrowth and Postgrowth, Laurin then takes the intermediate step before going full Hitler. He accuses Paech and German social psychologist Harald Welzer, another eminent advocate of Degrowth in Germany, for having an exclusive national perspective only focusing on a 'Green Germany' while neglecting the global context. From here it is just a small logically inconsistent leap to place Degrowth and Postgrowth thinking next to Nazism and a 'völkisch' ideology. Laurin concludes that Degrowth is an inhuman ideology against all principles of enlightenment, with origins in a brown-green swamp of 'völkisch' environmentalism. Its adherents are ignorant, historically blind and turned stupid by living in a luxury that most people on the planet can only dream of.

You could argue of course, why pay attention to a German journalist no one has heard of before, writing on a blog hardly anyone reads? Because in discussions about Degrowth and Postgrowth, I myself encountered similarly structured arguments and I see the danger that they might form a narrative against Degrowth by discrediting it through a whole chain of logical inconsistent arguments, linking Degrowth to Nazism and its inhuman ideology. And then there is that nagging feeling I have had for a long time, that some discussions within the Degrowth and Postgrowth movement are sometimes blind to the very real dangers of escapism and localism and their connection to uglier ideological forms on the far right and left. But lets start first with Laurin's arguments.

The connection he draws between Nazism and environmentalism, the 'brown-green swamp', is a tired old trope that has been debunked many times yet still reemerges in discussions trying to smear green ideas. Kyle Bridge gives a nice overview on the arguments. Environmentalism started out in the 19th century in Britain and the US along with industrialization and with a strong conservationist perspective. In the 1920s and 1930s, environmentalism was instrumentalized by the Nazis but never really embraced. Environmental initiatives were never fully 'gleichgeschaltet' and the war preparations had clear dominance over any nature conservation efforts. The seemingly green Walther Darré was first and foremost a 'blood' thinker, not a 'soil' advocate and his imaginative grasp on the blossoming green movement in postwar Germany is non-existent. Quite differently, environmentalism became a left-wing project, first championed by the Social Democrats in the 1960s and 1970s, with politicians like Willy Brandt and Erhard Eppler, then with the formation of the German Green party born out of communist K-groups, feminists, internationalists, and anti-nuclear protesters. Framing environmentalism as closet Nazism is like calling vegetarians fascist just because Hitler liked his vegetables.

Laurin's lazy journalism continues when he frames Paech and his 'Postwachstumsökonomie' as a nationalist concept, totally ignoring the international debate on Degrowth and in fact its international conception, with the first Degrowth conference in Paris in 2008 that I had the great pleasure to attend. Moreover, Degrowth is not a concept for the over-riched societies of the global north but a truly global discourse on alternative development paradigms as can bee seen in the cross-polination of various concepts from Buen Vivir to Radical Ecological Democracy. While it is true that Paech and also Welzer focus in their writings on the German situation, this is very much understandable as both are Germans and refrain from giving well-meant suggestions to 'developing' countries on how they should organize their societies and economies. Degrowth is a multi-cultural and multi-contextual concept that needs translation and enculturation. To accuse German thinkers for focusing on the German context for Degrowth appears a bit odd. Especially given the case that both appeared on many podiums and panels on the 2014 Degrowth conference in Leipzig, actively engaging with international scholars and activists. What Laurin shows here is a lack of research as a journalist, a form of lazy armchair writing for armchair salons. To be fair, the blog he wrote the article is titled 'Salonkolumnisten'.

I do give Laurin credit though for raising an issue that the Degrowth community needs to address more full on. It does have a certain escapist streak, favoring localism over globalism, being overtly critical of a more liberal economic order and sometimes siding with nationalist arguments, be them from Syriza or Podemos (and thus too easily labeled 'good'). I myself have argued that Degrowth is at its heart a conservative perspective on humanities future stemming from its focus on contraction thus being too much focused on retrenchment and reduction. My plea would be to focus more on hope and also reclaim the notion of 'progress' and 'progressivism' for Degrowth. A wise move might be to apply Ivan Illich's concept of conviviality and its focus on individual autonomy realized in interdependence with our personal, social and natural environments - in short to hijack the very modernist term of 'freedom' for the Degrowth movement. It might also be an opportune move to draw a clearer distinction between Postgrowth and Degrowth, with Postgrowth being a larger umbrella for a diversity of approaches not focused on economic growth, while Degrowth is a more forceful concept with a clear political-economic idea for a contraction-based society. Postgrowth can then also entail some aspects of green growth or the green economy in a form of ' minimum beyond growth' policy program. Another issue that should be debated more openly is the connections of Degrowth and Postgrowth with the wider discourse on Sustainable Development and its inherent global(ist) outlook. Ashish Kothari, Alberto Acosta, Federico Demaria and I had an exchange of arguments about that and together with colleagues from the Institute of Technology Assessment and Systems Analysis (ITAS) at KIT I organized a workshop on these and other issues for the future of Postgrowth. One of the results is a German article on how to realign Postgrowth and Degrowth with Sustainable Development.

So what to make of Stefan Laurin and his article? Not much, as I pointed out here. Most of what he says can easily be debunked and it has to. The concept of Degrowth and the idea, that there is a multitude of positive Postgrowth futures for all humanity, is too important to let it be smeared by false accusations. And we as a community of scholars and activists should more strongly raise our voice against those who harbor ideologies of retreat, illiberalism and anti-globalism. We as Postgrowthers have a 'Bringschuld', one of those hard to translate German words, to bring a positive vision for a future beyond growth to the table - and not be silenced and ridiculed by people who sit in their comfy chairs.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Brown-Green Degrowth? On Nazis, Nationalism & the Postgrowth Economy

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
tl;dr: Stefan Laurin's painting of Degrowth into the right-wing nationalist corner is lazy armchair journalism The ideas of a Degrowth-oriented society are a crude mixture of environmentalism and National Socialism - says German journalist Stefan Laurin in a... #conviviality #degrowth #ivanillich

# data[].attributes.body
https://www.usnews.com/news/best-countries/articles/2017-07-10/immigration-forces-sweden-to-re-evaluate-its-welfare-state
Immigration to Sweden has been a huge topic of discussion in recent years, and this article discusses the issues and perspectives surrounding it.

# data[].attributes.headline
Making 50% of the planet a nature reserve?

# data[].attributes.subject
Making 50% of the planet a nature reserve?

# data[].attributes.body
"According to one recent report, the number of wild animals on Earth has halved in the past 40 years."  With wildlife declining at alarming rates, one radical solution suggests turning half of the planet into a nature reserve.  The argument is that humans share this planet with all other life, so 50% is not asking too much.  Land preservation is important because the planet's health is dependent on biodiversity.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The orangutan is one of our planet's most distinctive and intelligent creatures. It has been observed using primitive tools, such as the branch of a tree, to hunt food, and is capable of complex social behaviour. Orangutans also played a special role in humanity's own intellectual history when, in the 19th century, Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace, co-developers of the theory of natural selection, used observations of them to hone their ideas about evolution.

But humanity has not repaid orangutans with kindness. The numbers of these distinctive, red-maned primates are now plummeting thanks to our destruction of their habitats and illegal hunting of the species. Last week, an international study revealed that its population in Borneo, the animal's last main stronghold, now stands at between 70,000 and 100,000, less than half of what it was in 1995. "I expected to see a fairly steep decline, but I did not anticipate it would be this large," said one of the study's co-authors, Serge Wich of Liverpool John Moores University.

For good measure, conservationists say numbers are likely to fall by at least another 45,000 by 2050, thanks to the expansion of palm oil plantations, which are replacing their forest homes. One of Earth's most spectacular creatures is heading towards oblivion, along with the vaquita dolphin, the Javan rhinoceros, the western lowland gorilla, the Amur leopard and many other species whose numbers are today declining dramatically. All of these are threatened with the fate that has already befallen the Tasmanian tiger, the dodo, the ivory-billed woodpecker and the baiji dolphin - victims of humanity's urge to kill, exploit and cultivate.

As a result, scientists warn that humanity could soon be left increasingly isolated on a planet bereft of wildlife and inhabited only by ourselves plus domesticated animals and their parasites. This grim scenario will form the background to a key conference - Safeguarding Space for Nature and Securing Our Future - to be held in London on 27-28 February.

The aim of the symposium is straightforward: to highlight ways of establishing sufficient reserves and protected areas to halt or seriously limit the major extinction event that humanity now faces.

According to one recent report, the number of wild animals on Earth has halved in the past 40 years, as humans kill for food in unsustainable numbers and pollute or destroy habitats, and worse probably lies ahead.

Action is urgently need, say scientists. This point was acknowledged in 2010 at a major international conference in Japan, where governments agreed to establish a network of reserves and protected seas that would, by 2020, cover 17% of Earth's land surface and 10% of our oceans.

"With more than two years to go, we now have about 15% of land protected and about 7% of oceans," said one of the London conference's organisers, Mike Hoffman, of the Zoological Society of London.

New reserves include the Termit Tin Toumma national nature reserve in Niger, home of the addax antelope and dama gazelle, both critically endangered, as well as the Yaguas national park in Peru, which is known for its manatees, river dolphins, giant otters and woolly monkey.

Hoffman said: "The conference will assess how much these new reserves have helped conservation, examine the problems that have been encountered in setting them up, and look at ways to make further improvements to ensure we meet our target of 17% of land and 10% of ocean protection by the time the next major biodiversity conference is held in China in 2020."

But many conservationists argue that even if these goals could be achieved, they will still not halt extinctions. The current focus on protecting what humans are willing to spare for conservation is unscientific, they say. Instead, conservation targets should be determined by what is necessary to protect nature. This point is stressed by Harvey Locke, whose organisation, Nature Needs Half, takes a far bolder approach and campaigns for the preservation of fully 50% of our planet for wildlife by 2050.

"That may seem a lot - if you think the world is a just a place for humans to exploit," Locke told the Observer. "But if you recognise the world as one that we share with wildlife, letting it have half of the Earth does not seem that much."

The idea is supported by E O Wilson, the distinguished Harvard biologist, in his most recent book, . "We thrash about, appallingly led, with no particular goal other than economic growth and unfettered consumption," he writes. "As a result, we're extinguishing Earth's biodiversity as though the species of the natural world are no better than weeds and kitchen vermin." The solution, he says, is to fill half the planet with conservation zones - though just how this division is to be decided is not made clear in his book. In any case, Hoffman points out, simply setting aside huge chunks of land or marine areas will not, on its own, save the day. "We could earmark the whole of northern Canada as a wildlife reserve but, given the paucity of animals who live in these frozen regions, that would not have a significant effect on a great many species who live elsewhere," he said.

Locke makes a similar point: "Protecting all of Antarctica would also be an excellent idea and would certainly enhance the percentage of the world that is protected and do great things for life there. However, it would do nothing for tigers, toucans, lions and grizzly bears."

Simply setting aside half the planet as wilderness and using the other half for giant cities and farms poses other difficulties. Pollution, poaching and climate change triggered by carbon emissions and other human-caused problems would constantly seep from the human half of the planet into the wildlife "zone".

Instead, conservationists argue, a far more carefully integrated pattern of wildlife areas needs to be established, one that will allow animals to move relatively easily between reserves, and so maintain genetic diversity between populations.

"We need to focus less on simply protecting single, isolated wildlife areas - which are constantly being eaten away at the edges - to more effectively buffer and integrate these core areas into wider landscapes," says Noelle Kumpel of BirdLife International, which is also involved in next week's conference.

Such a goal will be tricky because, among many other reasons, animals are no great observers of human boundaries. They move out of protected areas at random and come into conflict with humans.

The problem is exemplified by the wolf, whose numbers have begun to flourish in Europe thanks to the efforts of conservationists. Last month, the first wolf on Belgian soil made its mark by killing at least two sheep, while similar attacks by wolves in France, Germany and Finland have led to demands for culls from angry farmers. Other animals that conservationists have succeeded in restoring in numbers in Europe - such as bears and jackals - have also caused controversy. Integrating humans and wild animals will not be easy.

One solution to be discussed at next week's conference will be the proposal to make our cities far greener than they are at present. This would reduce the impact of the pollution that they produce, but would also raise public awareness of wildlife issues, according to Daniel Raven-Ellison, a proponent of the creation of "national park cities".

Facebook Twitter Pinterest

The Regent's canal in London. Some argue only a small amount of the capital's land would be needed to make half its surface green. Photograph: Alamy

"London, for example, is a surprisingly green city," he said. "You would only need to plant on a relatively small amount of extra land to make half its surface green. That would have important ecological effects, but it would also have an important symbolic effect and help raise awareness of the issues we face."

Citizens of greener cities would be far more likely to engage with nature concerns and would be far more likely to extend their awareness to wildlife elsewhere in the world - to narwhals or turtles or to other threatened species, said Raven-Ellison. "The story of plastics and the oceans provides an example of what cities can do. There has been a real reaction in places like London to the use of plastics which get into the oceans and threaten marine life. As a result, there has been a drive here to have water fountains and use less plastics. Crucially, in cities we can turn up the dial in campaigns like these."

Other issues will be less easily dealt with, however. Of particularly concern is Africa. The continent is still fairly rich in wildlife, but is expected to change far more drastically than any other part of the world as humanity's growth continues throughout this century. According to the UN's most recent population figures, there are around 7.5 billion men, women and children living on our planet, and this is likely to rise to around 11.2 billion by the end of the century - with virtually all of that increase happening in Africa. That continent's population is expected to swell from 1.25 billion today to around 4.25 billion in 2100. By contrast, population growth in other continents will be relatively low.

The impact will be striking and will come as climate change also takes its toll on the continent's ecosystems, resulting in considerable international friction. As one observer pointed out: "Africans are not likely to be happy with the non-Africans in the international community telling them where and when they should set up reserves and telling them to halt logging or farming, given the plight they will find themselves in."

In fact,there are two separate issues at stake with regard to protecting habitats and wildlife for the future, Sir David Attenborough told the Observer. "First there is the moral dimension. We have a responsibility to all these forms of life on our planet because we have power over them.

"However, there is also a practical issue," he added. "We need to ensure that we have enough life forms on Earth to ensure the planet's health. But how many is enough? We simply do not know the answer to that question - though I think we should assume that it is a fairly large number and that they need protecting."

Safe havens

Facebook Twitter Pinterest

Green turtle. Photograph: Sam Weber/RSPB/PA

Green turtle
On 18 March 2015, the British government announced a plan to establish the largest marine reserve in the world, around the Pitcairn Islands in the south Pacific. At 834,000 sq km, the Pitcairn marine reserve will offer protection to some of the most pristine waters and coral reefs on Earth, and to a range of endangered species including the green turtle (Chelonia mydas), which is suffering major losses in numbers because of pollution and habitat loss, and from being trapped in fishing nets.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest

Giant otter. Photograph: Alamy

Giant otter
The western hemisphere's newest national reserve, the Yaguas national park, in rainforest in north-eastern Peru, protects millions of acres of wilderness. Apart from the indigenous people who live there, the Yaguas is home to endangered creatures including manatees, river dolphins, giant otters and woolly monkeys. The park joins a network of reserves recently created to preserve territory in other South American countries including Ecuador, Chile and Colombia.

peru graphic

Facebook Twitter Pinterest

An Addax. Photograph: Getty

Addax
The addax - also known as the screwhorn antelope - is one of the world's most endangered species of antelopes. Only a few hundred remain in the wild, after the species was hunted to near extinction because of its distinctive-flavoured meat. However, the establishment of the Termit Tin Toumma national nature reserve in Niger - where most remaining members of Addax nasomaculatus are concentrated - has raised hopes it can be preserved in the wild along with other endangered species such as the dama gazelle.

niger graphic

Facebook Twitter Pinterest

Spoon-billed Sandpiper. Photograph: John Harrison

Spoon-billed Sandpiper
China has announced a ban on land reclamation in coastal wetlands. In some areas, particularly in the Yellow Sea region, reclamation has caused many bird species to decline dangerously. For example, by 2014, it was believed there were fewer than 228 pairs of spoon-billed sandpipers. The directive falls short of creating protected reserves, but has raised hopes of wildlife being helped to recover there, and that China is now viewing the issue as important.

yellow sea graphic
Topics

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Should we give up half of the Earth to wildlife?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The orangutan is one of our planet's most distinctive and intelligent creatures. It has been observed using primitive tools, such as the branch of a tree, to hunt food, and is capable of complex social behaviour.

# data[].attributes.body
Israel authorities are implementing a deportation policy for refugees and immigrants of African descent. The article below captures different views on the issue.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
In a letter to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, 36 Holocaust survivors, many of them refugees from the ghettos and concentration camps of Europe, beseeched him "to learn the lesson" and not to expel Africans seeking asylum in Israel.

"As a country founded by refugees," said another letter signed by 850 Jewish clergy and delivered to Israeli embassies and consulates in the United States and Canada, "and whose early leaders helped craft the 1951 International Convention on the Status of Refugees, Israel must not deport those seeking asylum within its borders."

Like much of the Western world, Israel is grappling with how to balance its right to protect its borders and prevent illegal immigration with showing compassion and humanity. But the government's decision has struck a particular chord here and among Jews abroad since the modern state of Israel has served as a safe haven for Jews fleeing persecution and was largely built by immigrants.

The issue is also testing what it means to be a Jewish state: to preserve its Jewish majority, or to be governed by Jewish values, including the ideal of "tikkun olam," or repairing the world.

"Every country must guard its borders," Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in announcing the policy last month. "It is important that people understand that we are doing something here that is completely legal and completely essential."

He cited the "plight" of residents of south Tel Aviv, where many of the migrants are concentrated. In the past, he has also said that the influx of Africans threatened Israel's Jewish majority.

Many of the solidarity events are taking place under the umbrella of a grass-roots movement, "Stop the Deportation," which was started by students. In addition to the meeting in the basement studio of a Jerusalem yoga teacher, there was a gathering this week in a bar in Kiryat Shemona, a town on Israel's northern border, and another in the southern city of Beersheba in the Negev desert.

Another initiative, "Miklat Israel," Hebrew for Israel Sanctuary, and known informally as the Anne Frank Home Sanctuary movement, signed up about 500 Israeli families from scores of towns and communities willing to adopt asylum seekers and, if necessary, hide them in their homes.

First conceived by Susan Silverman, a rabbi and the sister of the American comedian Sarah Silverman, the idea was partly inspired by the story of another Eritrean who was so moved by Anne Frank's diary that he translated it into Tigrinya while in a camp in Ethiopia, then carried it with him on his journey to Israel, convinced that its people would receive him.

"We are exploding the myth that ordinary Israelis don't want them," said Rabbi Nava Hefetz, one of the group's leaders, adding that the small team of volunteers couldn't keep up with the flood of phone calls and emails.

"We are talking about the history of the Jewish people," she said, "from the exodus from Egypt to the terrible tragedy of the Holocaust. Refugeedom is in our DNA. Seeking asylum is in our blood."

Even secular Israelis have taken to citing biblical verses like Leviticus 19:34: "The stranger who resides among you shall be to you as one of your citizens; you shall love him as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt."

And liberals hark back to the decision of Menachem Begin, the prime minister who brought Mr. Netanyahu's right-wing Likud Party to power in 1977, to welcome several hundred Vietnamese boat people.

But Israelis are divided, with many others eager to see the departure of the Africans. Officials here routinely refer to them as "infiltrators" because they sneaked across the border from the Egyptian Sinai, and insist that the majority - young men of working age - are economic migrants, not refugees.

"Israel is too small and has its own problems," Israel's justice minister, Ayelet Shaked, said in a Facebook post. "It cannot serve as the employment agency for the African continent."

Many, including the Ashkenazi chief rabbi of Israel, David Lau, and his father, Yisrael Meir Lau, a former chief rabbi and child Holocaust survivor, reject the comparisons with the Holocaust. The migrants, they note, are not being sent to extermination camps and their Israeli sympathizers will not be risking their lives by harboring them.

About 60,000 African migrants have surreptitiously crossed into Israel over the once-porous border with Egypt since 2005, most of them Sudanese or Eritreans who cannot be sent back home because of international conventions that prevent the repatriation of asylum seekers to home countries where they could face persecution. The influx stopped in 2012, when Israel constructed a steel barrier along the 150-mile border with Egypt.

Of the thousands of Eritreans and Sudanese who have filed asylum requests in Israel in recent years, only about 10 have received refugee status. Some Sudanese refugees from war-torn Darfur have been given a special humanitarian status but most of the other asylum requests have not been processed.

At least 20,000 African migrants have since left Israel. Mr. Netanyahu said he had made it his mission to deport the rest. He and his ministers have alluded to secret understandings with third countries in Africa, without naming them.

The migrants say the main destination is Rwanda, but the Rwandan government has denied signing any secret deal. It says its policy toward Africans in need of a home is one of "open doors," but only to those who come voluntarily.

Migrant and human rights organizations say many Africans who left Israel for Rwanda and Uganda did not find work or receive legal status. Many are said to have continued on their journeys, often putting themselves in grave danger.

Interior Minister Aryeh Deri told a parliamentary committee this week that Israel had deported more than 5,000 non-African illegal immigrants since last year, proof that the government policy was not racist; more than 20,000 Ukrainians and Georgians have sought asylum in Israel in recent years.

Under increasing public pressure, he clarified that the new policy would apply only to single African men who had not formally submitted an asylum request by Jan. 1. It would not apply to families or the roughly 5,000 children of asylum-seekers who had been born in Israel. The migrants have until April 1 to accept the cash and flight or face detention.

Yonatan Jakubowicz, director of the Israeli Immigration Policy Center, an organization supportive of the government's arguments, said he thought that Israel had taken a "very balanced" position in "looking for that middle ground," and that other countries could learn from it.

In the Jerusalem basement, Mr. Tehehaymanut said he had initially hoped to go to Libya, and from there to Europe. But the Bedouin smugglers dropped his group off in the desert in the middle of the night and told them to walk straight ahead toward the lights of Israel.

Israeli soldiers received them with smiles, food and drink. "We did not come to eat," Mr. Tehehaymanut said. "Just to live."

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Israel Moves to Expel Africans. Critics Say That's Not Jewish.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
In a letter to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, 36 Holocaust survivors, many of them refugees from the ghettos and concentration camps of Europe, beseeched him "to learn the lesson" and not to expel Africans seeking asylum in Israel.

# data[].attributes.headline
Sweden's so called "sustainable forestry"

# data[].attributes.subject
Sweden's so called "sustainable forestry"

# data[].attributes.body
Critics, and this is an increasing number, argue against- the notion of Sweden's reputation of having a sustainable forestry. Main counterargument is the continous removal/transformation of natural (untouched/cultivated) forests. Not many great sources in english here but found a couple to highlight different views.
https://www.swedishwood.com/about_wood/choosing-wood/wood-and-the-environment/the-forest-and-sustainable-forestry/
http://skyddaskogen.se/en/news/2604-forestry-in-sweden-is-not-sustainable
http://www.government.se/articles/2015/08/swedish-strategy-for-biodiversity-and-ecosystem-services/

# data[].attributes.headline
 Are social networking sites good for our society?

# data[].attributes.subject
 Are social networking sites good for our society?

# data[].attributes.headline
Electric cars are strongly incrasing, but are they a sustainable option?

# data[].attributes.subject
Electric cars are strongly incrasing, but are they a sustainable option?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Tesla’s Electric Cars Aren’t as Green as You Might Think

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Despite their green cred, Tesla cars create pollution and carbon emissions in ways that are easily overlooked by consumers and investors.

# data[].attributes.headline
Billionaires could end extreme poverty 7 times

# data[].attributes.subject
Billionaires could end extreme poverty 7 times

# data[].attributes.body
“The billionaire boom is not a sign of a thriving economy but a symptom of a failing economic system,” said Winnie Byanyima, executive director of Oxfam International.

Unfortunately this is quite off the international debate, but it's nevertheless more urgent than ever to talk about the inequalities of the worlds wealth distribution .

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Billionaires Made So Much Money Last Year They Could End Extreme Poverty Seven Times

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The world's billionaires saw their wealth surge by $762B, which is enough to end extreme poverty seven times over, according to Oxfam.

# data[].attributes.body
A huge public debate in the US at the moment is the controversial one of gun control. The  debate flared up again efter the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, in Parkland, Florida.

"This time feels different. Will things finally change?"

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Is this the moment when the politics of guns shifts? Since the fatal shooting of seventeen students and staff members last month at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, in Parkland, Florida, advocates of stricter gun laws have been asking that question, with the wary hopefulness of people who, time and again, have seen such turning points lead nowhere. This moment does feel different, though, largely because the teen-age survivors of the Parkland shooting have commanded the national stage with their raw and righteous indignation.

Last week, they got a real response, though so far it has come more from businesses than from elected representatives. The nationwide sporting-goods chain Dick's announced that it would no longer carry assault-style rifles or high-capacity magazines, and would not sell guns to people under the age of twenty-one, regardless of local laws. The company's C.E.O., Edward Stack, told the Times, "We love these kids and their rallying cry 'Enough is enough.' It got to us." By the end of the week, Kroger and Walmart had said that their stores, too, would no longer sell guns to customers younger than twenty-one.

Meanwhile, President Trump startled senators and representatives in a meeting at the White House last Wednesday by telling them that he wanted to revive a bill mandating universal background checks for gun buyers, chiding them for being frightened of the N.R.A., and saying that, in some situations, he was in favor of taking people's guns away first, and asking questions later. This was particularly outlandish, given his ties to the N.R.A. and his enthusiasm for arming schoolteachers, not to mention the fact that, a day later, he was back tweeting "Good (Great) meeting tonight at the Oval Office with the NRA!"

But his remarks matter, anyway. The primitive sensors by which Donald Trump divides the world into winners and losers were telling him that for now, at least, the proponents of unfettered gun rights smell like losers. According to a Politico/Morning Consult poll conducted last week, eighty-eight per cent of Americans now support universal background checks, eighty-one per cent think that a person should be at least twenty-one in order to buy a gun, seventy per cent endorse a ban on high-capacity magazines, and sixty-eight per cent support a ban on assault-style weapons.

Still, gun-control advocates might not want to place too much hope in any single moment, even this one. They will have to play a long game, made up of many moments. That's what their opponents have done. Matthew Lacombe, a doctoral candidate at Northwestern University, has been analyzing the N.R.A.'s rhetoric over the decades in editorials and letters to the editor that have appeared in its magazine, The American Rifleman. The organization's leaders and members used a remarkably consistent series of words to describe their identity: "law-abiding," "peaceable," "patriotic," "freedom-loving," and "average citizens." Their opponents were "un-American," "tyrannical," "Communist," and "élitist." Wayne LaPierre, the president of the N.R.A., echoed this language in a speech last week at the Conservative Political Action Committee, invoking a Democratic Party "infested with saboteurs who don't believe in capitalism, don't believe in the Constitution, don't believe in our freedom, and don't believe in America as we know it."

The N.R.A. has been honing its message since the nineteen-thirties, when it first became visible on the national scene, fighting federal legislation that mandated an early gun-registration and dealer-licensing system. "By the time the bill emerged from the lawmaking process," the political scientist Carol Skalnik Leff and the historian Mark Leff write, it had been "gutted-stripped of its handgun clauses and revised in line with the objections of the National Rifle Association."

The N.R.A.'s advantage isn't only its ability to donate to candidates or to pay for expensive lobbyists and ads, though that is formidable. It spent four hundred and nineteen million dollars in the 2016 election cycle, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, which reports that "career NRA support for some members of the 115th Congress now reaches well into the seven-figure range." It spent more than thirty million dollars supporting Trump's campaign.

But the organization also benefits from its unequivocal rejection of virtually all gun regulations, and from the way that certainty resonates. Most gun owners are not N.R.A. members, but, according to Gallup, people who want lenient gun laws are significantly more likely to be single-issue voters than those who want stricter laws. Gun owners are also more likely than non-gun owners to have contacted a public official about gun policy.

All kinds of people own guns, for all kinds of reasons. Still, some demographic features of gun ownership tend to reinforce a particular political posture. A 2017 Pew Research Center study found that forty-eight per cent of white men own a gun, compared with twenty-five per cent of white women, twenty-five per cent of non-white men, and sixteen per cent of non-white women. Gun owners are far more likely to live in rural areas. Forty-one per cent of whites with a bachelor's degree are gun owners, versus twenty-six per cent of whites with a more advanced degree. Half of all gun owners say that ownership is essential to their identity.

Fear is a factor: nearly half of male gun owners and almost a third of female owners say that they have a loaded gun "easily accessible to them at all times at home." According to the Pew study, "There is a significant link between owning a gun for protection and perceptions of whether the world broadly speaking has become more dangerous." Jennifer Carlson, a sociologist who interviewed male gun owners in Michigan, found that many of them considered firearms crucial to reclaiming a sense of purpose, especially if they were no longer breadwinners.

Security, nostalgia for an era of unchallenged privilege, a sense of beleaguered white masculinity: these are powerful forces. They helped get Donald Trump elected. Advocacy for gun-control laws may never provide the same single-minded identity that politicized gun ownership seems to exert. But this year, again thanks in part to the Parkland students, it's beginning to take a stronger hold. People who want this moment to mean something should remember that they are the majority, and that they, too, can choose, for however long it takes, to be single-issue voters. ♦

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Is this the moment when the politics of guns shifts? Since the fatal shooting of seventeen students and staff members last month at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, in Parkland, Florida, advocates of stricter gun laws have been asking that question, with the wary hopefulness of people who, time and again, have seen such turning points lead nowhere.

# data[].attributes.body
This new kind of vehicle is taking to the roads, and people are not sure if it is safe? How will it get along with other road users? Will it really shake up the way we travel?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Self-driving cars are coming. In fact, they are already here. A self-driving truck transported beer in Colorado . In California, they are logging literally thousands of miles . Car manufactures and major tech companies like , , , and, most recently, are competing to stay on the cutting edge of this technology.

It's no longer a matter of "if," but rather "when" the streets and highways of our world become populated by self-driving machines with people and cargo as their idle passengers .

Technological change usually comes upon us whether we like it or not. But even a feeling of inevitability shouldn't excuse a lack of reflexion. Technological progress isn't an inherent good. It brings with it much more than that.

Let's take a look at self-driving cars, and THE GOOD, THE BAD, and THE UGLY.
Self-Driving Cars: THE GOOD
Over 37,000 Americans and 1.3 million people globally die every year in automobile accidents. Those are staggering numbers. It's the ninth leading cause of death globally ( just ahead of HIV/AIDS ), and it's the only non-disease entry on the top ten list.

Have you ever thought about the power that's in your hands when you drive a car? It's actually quite remarkable that we entrust millions of people across the world (you and me included) to navigate two-ton metal machines speeding at 60 mph between buildings, pedestrians, and other vehicles. We're not even that good at it.

While human driving error is not the sole cause of all 1.3 million deaths, some estimates put the number of accidents committed through human error as high as 94% . Self-driving cars might not be able to eliminate all driving fatalities, but couldn't they lower the number?

It seems pretty safe to assume that self-driving cars would at least outperform a drunk driver or a texting teen, which would go a long way to saving lives on our roads.

Almost a third of fatal traffic accidents in the U.S. are caused by drunk drivers (around 10,000). Additionally, cell phone use and texting have led to a spike in accidents related to distracted driving. According to the Center for Disease Control, distracted driving kills more than eight people and injuries more than a thousand people in the U.S. alone. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration estimates that 80% of traffic accidents and 16% of traffic fatalities are related to distracted driving.

And so we arrive at THE GOOD. While further arguments could me made for efficiency gains , financial benefits , and even the prospect of creating transportation independence for the blind or disabled, let's just stick with the biggest argument in favor.

THE GOOD: Self-driving cars can save lives!
Self-Driving Cars: THE BAD
Think about your most recent drive: did you pass any delivery trucks? A local bus? Maybe a taxi or two? All those vehicles are piloted by paid employees. And lots of people make a living by driving- millions of people, in fact.

Roughly 3.5 million people in the U.S. make their living from driving vehicles around.

NPR made noise a couple of years ago when they published a map showing the most common job in every state, and truck drivers dominated by leading the way in 29 of the 50 states. While these statistics don't paint the clearest picture , the fact is that roughly 2.8 million Americans make a living by driving trucks.

On top of that, there are taxi drivers. New York City alone has over 13,000 medallion-licensed taxi drivers , not to mention all the Uber and Lyft employees (errr... contractors ?). Across the country, the total number of U.S. licensed taxi drivers and chauffeurs is around , while Uber claims the engagement of around 160,000 drivers . Throw in half a million school bus drivers and around transit bus drivers, and you get the picture. Lots of jobs.

So we arrive at THE BAD. Let's skip over the periphery jobs that could also be lost , and excuse the fact that the job statistics are U.S.-focused . An argument could also be made for the health effects of safer driving that would worsen the shortage of organ donors . But there is one argument against self-driving cars that is the most prominent.

THE BAD: Self-driving cars will eliminate jobs!
Self-Driving Cars: THE UGLY
What about accidents that do occur? What about accidents that are unavoidable?

Results have shown that human error has played a primary role in almost every reported accident with a self-driving vehicle, but the increased use of self-driving vehicles will inevitably involve more accidents, including fatal ones.

In May of last year, the fatal crash of a self-driving Tesla in Florida applied the strongest brakes to the self-driving car movement and tempered enthusiasm. In the incident , a tractor trailer made an ill-advised left turn into oncoming traffic, and the white side of the trailer against a brightly lit sky wasn't picked up by the vehicle (nor the driver who was still behind the wheel). The self-driving car did not "see" the tractor trailer. So who is responsible for this accident? The rider? The manufacturer?

This was the first case of a fatality from an automation error. But a bigger ethical question looms. How will we program self-driving vehicles to confront situations where an accident is inevitable? What if the outcome varies based on different maneuvers?

Let me illustrate by example:
Car A and Car B are two self-driving cars that are side-by-side on a highway. An inattentive child darts in front of the car on the left (Car A). The car's computer notices the child, and calculates the following options:

1- Swerve left to avoid both the child and the other car, and head into the median where Car A's rider has a 60% chance of survival.

2- Swerve right to avoid the child, but collide with Car B from the passenger side, where Car A's rider has a 80% chance of survival but Car B's driver has just a 30% chance of survival.

3- Apply the brakes swiftly but maintain a straight course. The child has a 1% chance of survival, Car A's rider now has a 99% chance of survive, and Car B won't be impacted.

A human driver who has to confront such a situation wouldn't have time to calculate the odds, and would have to react instinctively. Given the frightening outcomes, we would be quite sympathetic regardless of how the driver responds.

But with a self-driving car that can run calculations and make decisions in fractions of a second...how would we want it to respond?? That is to say: how would we program it?

Should it swerve left to assume the lowest odds at killing someone, although the highest risk would fall on the car's rider/owner? Should it swerve right to protect a young child, even if it risks adult riders? Should it stay the course to protect the safety of its owner above all others?

An ethical dilemma like this should give us pause. The more that we allow technology to interact with us in the world, the more we force technology to confront ethical dilemmas. In the case of self-driving cars, we are literally placing a potential killing machine (a 2-ton vehicle) in the control of a computer.

We have reached THE UGLY. Let's pass over the murky question of the environmental impact , and the legal uncertainties of potential lawsuits, and go to the clear winner.

THE UGLY: the ethical puzzle of self-driving cars is complex and controversial.

**** Have we given sufficient thought to these factors? Have we weighed THE GOOD, THE BAD and the UGLY?

I'm afraid not.

That is to say, I am literally afraid that we have not considered all of these factors, especially not THE UGLY.

Why? Because there is one "GOOD" that I did not address: the earning potential for manufacturers of self-driving cars.

In the U.S., we are in a seven-year streak of growing sales in the auto industry, with 17.6 million cars sold in 2016. As for the global level, hold your breath. In 2010, we passed the one billion mark for the number of cars on the roads. Projections suggest that the total could reach 2.5 billion cars by the year 2050 (!!!). That's a LOT of cars; that's a LOT of cars to be sold. And if the wave of the future is self-driving cars, that includes a lot of cars to be replaced . In other words: $$$.

Here's the bottom line: the financial incentives for automakers and tech companies is enormous. Literally billions of dollars in profits are at stake.

Let this give us pause to reflect.

THE GOOD of reducing traffic fatalities and accidents in general is valuable and a tremendous human good.

THE BAD of lost jobs is frightening, as we continue to confront the loss of millions of lower-skilled jobs to new technology (in which we basically always favor the technological gains to the preservation of the jobs).

But THE UGLY, especially in this case, is something that deserves even more thought and reflection. A self-driving car is not on an equal level as all other forms of technology, especially when it comes to life and death ethical choices.

While your iPhone might be a real time-suck, it's not going to make a decision that could take someone's life. Drones have the power to kill, but we still haven't granted them the ability to choose their own targets (and for good reason). With self-driving cars, there is no avoiding it. A two-ton vehicle speeding among other cars and people will inevitably make contact. Ethical choices will have to be embedded in their programming.

We cannot allow the inevitability of technological advance to impede us from reflecting on the risks at stake. We cannot allow profit-driven corporations to play up the benefits of new technology while diverting attention from the unavoidable ethical dilemmas contained within. What values guide our policies on the programming and development of self-driving cars? Ethics? Or financial gains?

We have to give more careful consideration to all aspects: THE GOOD, THE BAD, and THE UGLY. Only then can we make informed decisions about how to create and control the technology that will become a part of our future.

The time to reflect is now, while the wheel is still under our control.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Self-Driving Cars: The Good, the Bad & the Ugly

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Self-driving cars are coming. In fact, they are already here. A self-driving truck transported beer in Colorado . In California, they are logging literally thousands of miles . Car manufactures and major tech companies like , , , and, most recently, are competing to stay on the cutting edge of this technology.

# data[].attributes.body
The debate on aviation tax is currently popular in Sweden as a way to decrease the emissions from airplane travel. I’ve linked some articles/opinion pages on it below, although unfortunately some of them are in Swedish. The main argument for the tax relies on the basis that it would encourage travel that is more environmentally friendly. Arguments against often center around that the tax in fact would not do much in order to decrease emissions, hasn’t been proven to be effective, and thus is not the right line of action. Another argument against is that the aviation tax is problematic from an equity standpoint as it would mainly target people with smaller incomes who already fly less – the most frequent flyers who consists of a wealthy elite would presumably not change their flying habits much with an aviation tax as they still can afford the tickets. Based on these ideas, a proposal by some people is a frequent flyer levy where those who fly more should pay more.

https://www.thelocal.se/20170608/what-you-need-to-know-about-swedens-proposed-new-airline-tax

https://www.svd.se/the-aviation-industry-always-say-no-to-taxes

https://www.svt.se/nyheter/utrikes/en-debatt-med-moraliska-overtoner

https://www.svt.se/opinion/centerpartisterna-rickard-nordin-och-anders-akesson-om-flygskatten

http://neweconomics.org/2015/06/a-fairer-way-to-fly/

# data[].attributes.body
Gender quotas are often used as a tool to break the glass ceiling to get more women into positions of power in government or companies. Proponents say it is a necessary and transitionary tool, a way of making cultural change happen more quickly. Opponents either put forward that the women who will occupy those positions thanks to quotas will appear as just have gotten the job because they are women, not talent or say it's a from of discrimination.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/nov/20/eu-to-push-for-40-quota-for-women-on-company-boards

# data[].attributes.body
https://www.seeker.com/animals/birds-have-much-bigger-enemies-than-wind-turbines
An article responding to Trump's claim that wind power is killing birds, finances, and the environment. However, even among environmentalists the debate about wind power is heated when comparing the advantages of fossil-free and renewable energy with the way wind turbines are produced and transported and their relatively short life span.

# data[].attributes.body
This article argues that GMOs may be a necessary tool for water and food security as 90% of the worlds fresh water is already used for agriculture.

https://www.digitaltrends.com/cool-tech/genetic-engineered-crops-more-efficient-water/

# data[].attributes.headline
"Female genital mutilation" one of most unrealistic practice in few society. The debating point is that is it a notions of society or a part of religion or a way to dominate women's desire in names of honesty !!!

# data[].attributes.subject
"Female genital mutilation" one of most unrealistic practice in few society. The debating point is that is it a notions of society or a part of religion or a way to dominate women's desire in names of honesty !!!

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Find out what female genital mutilation (FGM) is, why and where's it carried out, what the health risks are, and where to get help and advice.

# data[].attributes.headline
The ideal diet for health and sustainability is still being debated 

# data[].attributes.subject
The ideal diet for health and sustainability is still being debated 

# data[].attributes.body
https://www.nbcnews.com/better/pop-culture/pros-cons-america-s-favorite-diet-plans-ncna854396

# data[].attributes.body
Amazon first managed to increase online shopping to a large extent, influencing consumer behaviour and our relationship to purchase products from all over the world.
Now, Amazon tries to sell the initial idea of non-virtual shopping to consumers in form of classic supermarkets. However, they are slighly different from what we are used to...

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2018/jan/21/amazons-first-automated-store-opens-to-public-on-monday

# data[].attributes.body
Though this debate topic may seem broad within the course theme, women’s right and health are featured in the sustainable development goals.
There are of course varying perspectives on this topic: overpopulation, life quality, mother’s wellbeing, religious (remember not just Christianity) standpoints of human life..

http://www.ipas.org/~/media/Files/PubsManual/SDAFCTE15.ashx

# data[].attributes.headline
Is artificial intelligence a bad or a good thing?

# data[].attributes.subject
Is artificial intelligence a bad or a good thing?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Click here to see this page in other languages: Chinese French German Japanese Korean Russian

" Everything we love about civilization is a product of intelligence, so amplifying our human intelligence with artificial intelligence has the potential of helping civilization flourish like never before - as long as we manage to keep the technology beneficial."

Max Tegmark, President of the Future of Life Institute

What is AI?

From SIRI to self-driving cars, artificial intelligence (AI) is progressing rapidly. While science fiction often portrays AI as robots with human-like characteristics, AI can encompass anything from Google's search algorithms to IBM's Watson to autonomous weapons.

Artificial intelligence today is properly known as narrow AI (or weak AI), in that it is designed to perform a narrow task (e.g. only facial recognition or only internet searches or only driving a car). However, the long-term goal of many researchers is to create general AI (AGI or strong AI). While narrow AI may outperform humans at whatever its specific task is, like playing chess or solving equations, AGI would outperform humans at nearly every cognitive task.

Why research AI safety?

In the near term, the goal of keeping AI's impact on society beneficial motivates research in many areas, from economics and law to technical topics such as verification, validity, security and control. Whereas it may be little more than a minor nuisance if your laptop crashes or gets hacked, it becomes all the more important that an AI system does what you want it to do if it controls your car, your airplane, your pacemaker, your automated trading system or your power grid. Another short-term challenge is preventing a devastating arms race in lethal autonomous weapons.

In the long term, an important question is what will happen if the quest for strong AI succeeds and an AI system becomes better than humans at all cognitive tasks. As pointed out by I.J. Good in 1965, designing smarter AI systems is itself a cognitive task. Such a system could potentially undergo recursive self-improvement, triggering an intelligence explosion leaving human intellect far behind. By inventing revolutionary new technologies, such a superintelligence might help us eradicate war, disease, and poverty, and so the creation of strong AI might be the biggest event in human history. Some experts have expressed concern, though, that it might also be the last, unless we learn to align the goals of the AI with ours before it becomes superintelligent.

There are some who question whether strong AI will ever be achieved, and others who insist that the creation of superintelligent AI is guaranteed to be beneficial. At FLI we recognize both of these possibilities, but also recognize the potential for an artificial intelligence system to intentionally or unintentionally cause great harm. We believe research today will help us better prepare for and prevent such potentially negative consequences in the future, thus enjoying the benefits of AI while avoiding pitfalls.

How can AI be dangerous?

Most researchers agree that a superintelligent AI is unlikely to exhibit human emotions like love or hate, and that there is no reason to expect AI to become intentionally benevolent or malevolent. Instead, when considering how AI might become a risk, experts think two scenarios most likely:

1. The AI is programmed to do something devastating: Autonomous weapons are artificial intelligence systems that are programmed to kill. In the hands of the wrong person, these weapons could easily cause mass casualties. Moreover, an AI arms race could inadvertently lead to an AI war that also results in mass casualties. To avoid being thwarted by the enemy, these weapons would be designed to be extremely difficult to simply "turn off," so humans could plausibly lose control of such a situation. This risk is one that's present even with narrow AI, but grows as levels of AI intelligence and autonomy increase.

2. The AI is programmed to do something beneficial, but it develops a destructive method for achieving its goal: This can happen whenever we fail to fully align the AI's goals with ours, which is strikingly difficult. If you ask an obedient intelligent car to take you to the airport as fast as possible, it might get you there chased by helicopters and covered in vomit, doing not what you wanted but literally what you asked for. If a superintelligent system is tasked with a ambitious geoengineering project, it might wreak havoc with our ecosystem as a side effect, and view human attempts to stop it as a threat to be met.

As these examples illustrate, the concern about advanced AI isn't malevolence but competence. A super-intelligent AI will be extremely good at accomplishing its goals, and if those goals aren't aligned with ours, we have a problem. You're probably not an evil ant-hater who steps on ants out of malice, but if you're in charge of a hydroelectric green energy project and there's an anthill in the region to be flooded, too bad for the ants. A key goal of AI safety research is to never place humanity in the position of those ants.

Why the recent interest in AI safety

Stephen Hawking, Elon Musk, Steve Wozniak, Bill Gates, and many other big names in science and technology have recently expressed concern in the media and via open letters about the risks posed by AI, joined by many leading AI researchers. Why is the subject suddenly in the headlines?

The idea that the quest for strong AI would ultimately succeed was long thought of as science fiction, centuries or more away. However, thanks to recent breakthroughs, many AI milestones, which experts viewed as decades away merely five years ago, have now been reached, making many experts take seriously the possibility of superintelligence in our lifetime. While some experts still guess that human-level AI is centuries away, most AI researches at the 2015 Puerto Rico Conference guessed that it would happen before 2060. Since it may take decades to complete the required safety research, it is prudent to start it now.

Because AI has the potential to become more intelligent than any human, we have no surefire way of predicting how it will behave. We can't use past technological developments as much of a basis because we've never created anything that has the ability to, wittingly or unwittingly, outsmart us. The best example of what we could face may be our own evolution. People now control the planet, not because we're the strongest, fastest or biggest, but because we're the smartest. If we're no longer the smartest, are we assured to remain in control?

FLI's position is that our civilization will flourish as long as we win the race between the growing power of technology and the wisdom with which we manage it. In the case of AI technology, FLI's position is that the best way to win that race is not to impede the former, but to accelerate the latter, by supporting AI safety research.

The Top Myths About Advanced AI

A captivating conversation is taking place about the future of artificial intelligence and what it will/should mean for humanity. There are fascinating controversies where the world's leading experts disagree, such as: AI's future impact on the job market; if/when human-level AI will be developed; whether this will lead to an intelligence explosion; and whether this is something we should welcome or fear. But there are also many examples of of boring pseudo-controversies caused by people misunderstanding and talking past each other. To help ourselves focus on the interesting controversies and open questions -- and not on the misunderstandings -- let's clear up some of the most common myths.

Timeline Myths

The first myth regards the timeline: how long will it take until machines greatly supersede human-level intelligence? A common misconception is that we know the answer with great certainty.

One popular myth is that we know we'll get superhuman AI this century. In fact, history is full of technological over-hyping. Where are those fusion power plants and flying cars we were promised we'd have by now? AI has also been repeatedly over-hyped in the past, even by some of the founders of the field. For example, John McCarthy (who coined the term "artificial intelligence"), Marvin Minsky, Nathaniel Rochester and Claude Shannon wrote this overly optimistic forecast about what could be accomplished during two months with stone-age computers: "We propose that a 2 month, 10 man study of artificial intelligence be carried out during the summer of 1956 at Dartmouth College [...] An attempt will be made to find how to make machines use language, form abstractions and concepts, solve kinds of problems now reserved for humans, and improve themselves. We think that a significant advance can be made in one or more of these problems if a carefully selected group of scientists work on it together for a summer."

On the other hand, a popular counter-myth is that we know we won't get superhuman AI this century. Researchers have made a wide range of estimates for how far we are from superhuman AI, but we certainly can't say with great confidence that the probability is zero this century, given the dismal track record of such techno-skeptic predictions. For example, Ernest Rutherford, arguably the greatest nuclear physicist of his time, said in 1933 --- less than 24 hours before Szilard's invention of the nuclear chain reaction --- that nuclear energy was "moonshine.'' And Astronomer Royal Richard Woolley called interplanetary travel "utter bilge'' in 1956. The most extreme form of this myth is that superhuman AI will never arrive because it's physically impossible. However, physicists know that a brain consists of quarks and electrons arranged to act as a powerful computer, and that there's no law of physics preventing us from building even more intelligent quark blobs.

There have been a number of surveys asking AI researchers how many years from now they think we'll have human-level AI with at least 50% probability. All these surveys have the same conclusion: the world's leading experts disagree, so we simply don't know. For example, in such a poll of the AI researchers at the 2015 Puerto Rico AI conference, the average (median) answer was by year 2045, but some researchers guessed hundreds of years or more.

There's also a related myth that people who worry about AI think it's only a few years away. In fact, most people on record worrying about superhuman AI guess it's still at least decades away. But they argue that as long as we're not 100% sure that it won't happen this century, it's smart to start safety research now to prepare for the eventuality. Many of the safety problems associated with human-level AI are so hard that they may take decades to solve. So it's prudent to start researching them now rather than the night before some programmers drinking Red Bull decide to switch one on.

Controversy Myths

Another common misconception is that the only people harboring concerns about AI and advocating AI safety research are luddites who don't know much about AI. When Stuart Russell, author of the standard AI textbook, mentioned this during his Puerto Rico talk, the audience laughed loudly. A related misconception is that supporting AI safety research is hugely controversial. In fact, to support a modest investment in AI safety research, people don't need to be convinced that risks are high, merely non-negligible -- just as a modest investment in home insurance is justified by a non-negligible probability of the home burning down.

It may be that media have made the AI safety debate seem more controversial than it really is. After all, fear sells, and articles using out-of-context quotes to proclaim imminent doom can generate more clicks than nuanced and balanced ones. As a result, two people who only know about each other's positions from media quotes are likely to think they disagree more than they really do. For example, a techno-skeptic who only read about Bill Gates's position in a British tabloid may mistakenly think Gates believes superintelligence to be imminent. Similarly, someone in the beneficial-AI movement who knows nothing about Andrew Ng's position except his quote about overpopulation on Mars may mistakenly think he doesn't care about AI safety, whereas in fact, he does. The crux is simply that because Ng's timeline estimates are longer, he naturally tends to prioritize short-term AI challenges over long-term ones.

Myths About the Risks of Superhuman AI

Many AI researchers roll their eyes when seeing this headline: " Stephen Hawking warns that rise of robots may be disastrous for mankind." And as many have lost count of how many similar articles they've seen. Typically, these articles are accompanied by an evil-looking robot carrying a weapon, and they suggest we should worry about robots rising up and killing us because they've become conscious and/or evil. On a lighter note, such articles are actually rather impressive, because they succinctly summarize the scenario that AI researchers don't worry about. That scenario combines as many as three separate misconceptions: concern about consciousness, evil, and robots.

If you drive down the road, you have a subjective experience of colors, sounds, etc. But does a self-driving car have a subjective experience? Does it feel like anything at all to be a self-driving car? Although this mystery of consciousness is interesting in its own right, it's irrelevant to AI risk. If you get struck by a driverless car, it makes no difference to you whether it subjectively feels conscious. In the same way, what will affect us humans is what superintelligent AI does, not how it subjectively feels.

The fear of machines turning evil is another red herring. The real worry isn't malevolence, but competence. A superintelligent AI is by definition very good at attaining its goals, whatever they may be, so we need to ensure that its goals are aligned with ours. Humans don't generally hate ants, but we're more intelligent than they are - so if we want to build a hydroelectric dam and there's an anthill there, too bad for the ants. The beneficial-AI movement wants to avoid placing humanity in the position of those ants.

The consciousness misconception is related to the myth that machines can't have goals. Machines can obviously have goals in the narrow sense of exhibiting goal-oriented behavior: the behavior of a heat-seeking missile is most economically explained as a goal to hit a target. If you feel threatened by a machine whose goals are misaligned with yours, then it is precisely its goals in this narrow sense that troubles you, not whether the machine is conscious and experiences a sense of purpose. If that heat-seeking missile were chasing you, you probably wouldn't exclaim: "I'm not worried, because machines can't have goals!"

I sympathize with Rodney Brooks and other robotics pioneers who feel unfairly demonized by scaremongering tabloids, because some journalists seem obsessively fixated on robots and adorn many of their articles with evil-looking metal monsters with red shiny eyes. In fact, the main concern of the beneficial-AI movement isn't with robots but with intelligence itself: specifically, intelligence whose goals are misaligned with ours. To cause us trouble, such misaligned superhuman intelligence needs no robotic body, merely an internet connection - this may enable outsmarting financial markets, out-inventing human researchers, out-manipulating human leaders, and developing weapons we cannot even understand. Even if building robots were physically impossible, a super-intelligent and super-wealthy AI could easily pay or manipulate many humans to unwittingly do its bidding.

The robot misconception is related to the myth that machines can't control humans. Intelligence enables control: humans control tigers not because we are stronger, but because we are smarter. This means that if we cede our position as smartest on our planet, it's possible that we might also cede control.

The Interesting Controversies

Not wasting time on the above-mentioned misconceptions lets us focus on true and interesting controversies where even the experts disagree. What sort of future do you want? Should we develop lethal autonomous weapons? What would you like to happen with job automation? What career advice would you give today's kids? Do you prefer new jobs replacing the old ones, or a jobless society where everyone enjoys a life of leisure and machine-produced wealth? Further down the road, would you like us to create superintelligent life and spread it through our cosmos? Will we control intelligent machines or will they control us? Will intelligent machines replace us, coexist with us, or merge with us? What will it mean to be human in the age of artificial intelligence? What would you like it to mean, and how can we make the future be that way? Please join the conversation!

Recommended References

Many of the organizations listed on this page and their descriptions are from a list compiled by the Global Catastrophic Risk institute; we are most grateful for the efforts that they have put into compiling it. These organizations above all work on computer technology issues, though many cover other topics as well. This list is undoubtedly incomplete; please contact us to suggest additions or corrections.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Benefits & Risks of Artificial Intelligence - Future of Life Institute

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
What are the benefits and risks of artificial intelligence (AI)? Why do we need research to ensure that AI remains safe and beneficial?

# data[].attributes.body
The #MeToo movement - centering around women’s sexual harassment allegations finally being listened to. Is it a witch hunt? (And is this a bad thing?)

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/17/opinion/columnists/weinstein-harassment-witchunt.html

http://www.thejournal.ie/readme/debate-room-me-too-witch-hunt-3803090-Jan2018/

# data[].attributes.body
This article provides for a very interesting input in the discussion on Universal Basic Income (UBI). The article links UBI and sustainable consumption in a compelling way.

# data[].attributes.body
http://atlanta.cbslocal.com/2014/04/01/study-vegetarians-less-healthy-lower-quality-of-life-than-meat-eaters/

https://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/becoming-a-vegetarian

# data[].attributes.headline
Is a global climate treaty a want or a need?

# data[].attributes.subject
Is a global climate treaty a want or a need?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Cities Can Act on Climate, and Add Pressure

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
While we wait for an inter-governmental agreement, rapid action by cities, businesses and citizens can get us on an emissions downwards trajectory.