Science and Technology

Climate change will force mass migration

“When temperature rise exceeds 1.5 degrees Celsius (which could occur by 2026), some three billion will be living in places that regularly experience conditions beyond the human habitable range...[and] we are extremely unlikely to keep below 1.5 degrees C.” Gaia Vince in her book Nomad Century lays out the science in stark terms: we “face a very hostile world, characterised by a belt of uninhabitability swathed across most of today’s most populated regions... This is a completely new situation for our species, one in which our expanding population must deal with an ever-shrinking zone of...

Action on Covid-19

The science magazine Nature has published an assessment of scientific consensus on tackling Covid. It is based on surveying scientists’ opinions in early 2022. Then, recorded global case numbers were at their peak and the death count, at 1.4/ million/ day, was near the peak of 1.8 in early 2021. Now case, hospitalisation, case-fatality-rate, and death counts have fallen (deaths, to 0.2), and are falling. Wider vaccination (plus protection via previous infections), better treatments, and the non-emergence of a fiercer variant than Omicron, have helped. Yet some reverses must be expected in the...

Aviation: already approaching disaster point

Finlay Asher of Safe Landing , a climate-oriented group of aviation workers campaigning for long-term employment by challenging industry leaders to conform with climate science, spoke to Sacha Ismail. This is part one; part two, mainly about Safe Landing's idea of "workers' assemblies", is here . As well as running Safe Landing, I’m also involved in Extinction Rebellion [XR] Trade Unionists . Building the links between the trade union movement and the climate movement, and between struggles against the cost-of-living crisis and the climate crisis, is for me the most relevant thing going on at...

Letter: 280 million years too late

Stuart Jordan’s article “The case against fracking” ( Solidarity 646 ) outlines the many downsides of fracking. In particular, he reports geologists’ opinions that the amount of gas available would supply less than 5% of Britain’s domestic supply in five years’ time. It may be worse than that. Results from exploratory drilling before the moratorium were disappointing, with rock samples found to contain only small quantities of extractable gas or oil. Unlike American deposits, these were at low pressure, making it even more difficult to extract usable quantities. This low pressure is a result...

The case for space

In the last few days, NASA has twice had to abort launches of the Artemis mission to the Moon. By the time this article appears in print, there may be another attempt, a successful launch or a failure. Regardless of what will happen, I will watch the launch attempts with enthusiasm — and I say this as a socialist. Watching a weekend politics programme this morning on the BBC, I saw a journalist attempt to coax a Labour politician to say something positive or negative about the Artemis mission — with little success. There is a sense that many on the Left either take no interest in exploring...

Uber, capitalism, Peter Mandelson and GMB

“Uber broke laws, duped police and secretly lobbied governments, leak reveals”. So the Guardian summarises its exposé of platform delivery and transport corporation Uber, based on 124,000 leaked documents. On 10 and 11 July it published 26 articles as part of its series on “The Uber files”, with more to come on 12 and 13 July. As well as illustrating vividly many things about the nature of the profit system, of capitalism­ ­— the Guardian reporting covers both the super-exploitation of Uber’s drivers and, in more depth, the corporation’s wider anti-social activities — the revelations also...

Letter: Bitcoin's e-waste problem

Luca Brasco, in their article on blockchain in Solidarity 637 , identifies many of the flaws of cryptocurrencies and blockchain. I feel obliged to add a couple more. Modern bitcoin mining requires specialised hardware known as ASICs to be profitable. It is exercised as hard as possible to maximise returns. The chips typically burn out within eighteen months. In “Bitcoin’s growing e-waste problem”, Alex de Vries and Christian Stoll show us: “Bitcoin’s annual e-waste generation adds up to 30.7 metric kilotons as of May 2021... comparable to the small IT equipment waste produced by a country such...

Blockchain: gimmick, not solution

The aim of this article is to pour cold water on the hopes of beneficial use for blockchain technology. The first, and best known implementation of a blockchain is Bitcoin, “released” in 2008. Companies and venture capital firms started paying attention to it around 2014. Since then, billions of dollars have been poured into the blockchain, without anything to show for it. Blockchain evangelists have been hailing their technology as “the new internet”. But stripped down to it’s essentials, a blockchain is an immutable, distributed ledger. Bitcoin is an append-only list of transactions. If that...

Bird flu: a warning for the next pandemic

Avian flu has been affecting many countries this year, leading to widespread culling of poultry in UK, France, US, and other countries. In America this has led to direct-action protests at the methods used. Glen Taylor, a billionaire who also owns Rembrandt Enterprises, culled 5.3 million hens by “ventilatory shutdown plus” ( VSD+ ). Protesters glued themselves to goals to disrupt the games in April of the Minnesota Timberwolves basketball team, where Taylor is majority shareholder. US authorities (but not UK) advise that VSD+ is a legitimate method of cullting. The birds die slowly over...

Keep at-home early medical abortions legal!

Parliament will vote very soon on whether access to at-home early medical abortion, legalised during the pandemic, will remain legal. • Write to your MP here . If MPs do not support an amendment being introduced in the House of Commons, at-home early medical abortion will become a criminal offence on 29 August. The change introduced during the pandemic, by decision of the Secretary of State for Health, was to allow both the tablets necessary for the process to be taken at home, with medical consultation by remote means, rather than requiring the first one to be taken at a clinic or hospital....

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