Photos from a gay wedding near Philadelphia, PA, taken in 1957. The owner of the drugstore where these images were developed deemed them inappropriate and never returned them to the grooms. 60 years later, the photos were found, though archivists have been unsuccessful at locating any of the men pictured.
For years, climate-concerned people have assiduously used some sort of climate footprint “calculator” to figure out how many tons of carbon dioxide they emit annually because of their lifestyle; and, accordingly, how much blame they shoulder personally for climate change. What they probably don’t know is that the idea of a carbon footprint calculator was first invented by the geniuses at British Petroleum — not to encourage conservation, but to focus consumers’ attention on their own emissions and distract their attention from the incomparably greater emissions of the industry itself.
Yet asking how you, individually, can calculate and reduce your carbon footprint is very much asking the wrong question. I don’t want to know what I can do to reduce my estimated 0.00000005 percent of the world’s annual greenhouse gas emissions. I want to know what Big Oil is going to do to phase out the 73 percent of greenhouse gas emissions that they empower — which was 37,190,000,000 metric tons of CO2 in 2021. Of course, the fossil fuel industry would rather send me nosing into the compost in my backyard, than sniffing under the closed doors of political dealmaking that props up the hegemony of the fossil fuel economy.
i think next eurovision should be freaks only. if your entry doesn’t have a little screaming half-naked guy or some banging flutes, you can’t even get in
This week, parts of northern Italy’s Emilia-Romagna region received half their average annual rainfall in just 36 hours. Rivers burst their banks and thousands of acres of farmland lie submerged. By Thursday evening, an estimated 20,000 people had been left homeless and 13 were confirmed dead.
It is just the latest weather disaster to hit the country. Six months ago, 12 people died on the southern island of Ischia in a landslide triggered by torrential rain. Eleven more were killed last September by flash floods in the central region of Marche.
It is too soon for an attribution study to determine how much worse, or more likely, this week’s floods were made by human-caused global heating.
But across Europe, as atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide increase, so too does extreme weather – consecutive years of drought have afflicted farmers in Spain and southern France, while last year there were unprecedented heatwaves across the continent.
“Climate change is here and we are living the consequences. It isn’t some remote prospect, it is the new normal,” Paola Pino d’Astore, an expert at the Italian Society of Environmental Geology (SIGEA), told Reuters.
Experts say Italy’s geography makes it particularly vulnerable to climate disasters: its varied geology make it prone to floods and landslides, while rapidly warming seas either side make it vulnerable to increasingly powerful storms, amid rising temperatures.
The frontlines of the climate crisis have hitherto been in the global south, leading to the oft-repeated refrain that those least responsible for the climate crisis are facing the worst effects. But for Italy now, and probably soon the rest of Europe, the enemy is at the gates.
Last August, a weather station near Syracuse on the southern island of Sicily recorded 48.8C, which is thought to be the highest temperature ever measured in Europe. While the world fights a losing battle to keep the increase in global average temperatures below 1.5C, in Italy average temperatures over the past 10 years are already 2.1C higher than in pre-industrial times.
Coldiretti, a national farmers’ group, says the number of extreme weather events recorded last summer, including tornadoes, giant hail stones and lightning strikes, was five times the number registered a decade ago. And, like in many parts of the world already feeling the impacts of climate breakdown, it is farmers suffering the most: last year’s severe drought caused crop yields to fall by up to 45%.
The environmental group WWF Italia said the elimination of water-absorbing forests and vegetation along riverbanks in Emilia-Romagna had amplified this week’s disaster. Twenty three rivers burst their banks. Experts say it is the result of years of often unregulated building and industrial-scale agriculture.
Despite the crescendo of extreme weather disasters, Italian policymakers are only just beginning to intervene. The environment ministry published the country’s first National Plan for Adaptation to Climate Change in December 2022 – after almost four years of delay.
“A climate change adaptation policy that goes beyond how to handle emergencies and considers the effects of ordinary planning is increasingly urgent,” WWF Italia said in a statement.
