Maajid Nawaz bases his credibility on a compelling personal story, but how much of it is true?
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This article was first published by Alternet in 2016.
Maajid Nawaz, a native Briton of Pakistani background, tells a compelling personal story of his odyssey from extremist Islam to enlightenment.
He burst onto the scene in 2008, when he began marketing himself as an expert witness on the threat of radical Islamism. …
COVID-19 is an early warning signal for our breaching of planetary boundaries
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The COVID-19 pandemic did not come out of the blue. It was a symptom of the fundamental structures of industrial civilisation, and it is an early warning signal for how this civilisation is rapidly eroding the very conditions of its own existence.
Over the last decade, environmental scientists have warned that human activities are increasingly at risk of breaching planetary boundaries, which define the environmental limits in which humanity can safely operate. …
Crack team that advised UN Global Sustainable Development Report settle a longstanding debate with hard empirical data
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For years, financial institutions and governments have been focused on the idea of ‘decoupling’ GDP growth from resource use. This has been driven by the recognition that to stay within the ‘safe limit’ of 2 degrees Celsius, we have to dramatically reduce our material consumption.
The goal is to keep our economies growing to sustain prosperity while reducing our actual resource use and material footprint. The bottom line is that without reducing our overall use of planetary resources, we are bound to cross the line into a dangerous climate. …
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The COVID19 pandemic has exposed a strange anomaly in the global economy. If it doesn’t keep growing endlessly, it just breaks. Grow, or die.
But there’s a deeper problem. New scientific research confirms that capitalism’s structural obsession with endless growth is destroying the very conditions for human survival on planet Earth.
A landmark study in the journal Nature Communications, “Scientists’ warning on affluence” — by scientists in Australia, Switzerland and the UK — concludes that the most fundamental driver of environmental destruction is the overconsumption of the super-rich. …
The protests, the pandemic, and the planet: from systemic decline to civilizational renewal
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The US is on the brink of becoming a racist failed state. It is no accident that this terrible moment arrives in the midst of a global pandemic; an escalating economic crisis; an oil sector meltdown. This is a perfect storm of simultaneous, complex crises. How did we get here? How do we solve this?
If we’re not confused, perplexed and alarmed about this intensifying sequence of overlapping crises, we are not paying attention.
It’s time to start paying attention. Right now: We, the human species, stand at the dawn of a great civilizational inflection point. This is the fork in the road. The decisions we, you, make in this moment are about to make history. …
Only radical action and social distancing can avert a bloodbath
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If you search on the web for the term ‘coronavirus bloodbath’ (which I did after I noticed the term occurring repeatedly in the press), you’ll notice that the headlines are not about the mass deaths of vulnerable people that are inevitable on the sort of bungling business-as-usual trajectory adopted by the likes of President Donald Trump and Prime Minister Boris Johnson.
The headlines are about stocks. Shares. Wall Street. The economy. Oil. Growth. Business. Banks. Finance.
A systems analysis uncovering the light at the end of the tunnel
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Five years ago, the Commission on a Global Health Risk Framework for the Future, an independent panel of distinguished scientists, issued a landmark report warning that over the next century, the world would inevitably experience at least one pandemic. The report identified a 20 percent chance that the world would go through as many as four or more pandemics in this time-frame.
Shortly after, I advised Ubisoft on the authenticity of its pandemic-based video-game The Division. The game is set in a post-collapse New York, where a fictional virus, Variola Chimera, spreads rapidly across the city. At the time I was a visiting research fellow at the Global Sustainability Institute at Anglia Ruskin University’s Faculty of Science and Technology, developing a new scientific framework to understand the dynamics of social collapse. …
Britain’s capitulation to China’s Huawei is nothing new — for years, Western firms have profited from the world’s largest authoritarian surveillance project
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Official documents and reports reveal that some of the West’s biggest technology giants — from IBM to Microsoft — helped Huawei build the Chinese surveillance regime being weaponised against the Uighur minority. Now an Austrian firm, Frequentis, is using Huawei technology to supply ‘public security agencies’ in Britain, Europe and beyond. Boris Johnson’s love affair with the Chinese tech giant is only the latest episode. In this exclusive story, we reveal not only how Huawei played an integral role in the emergence of China’s repressive domestic security apparatus used today to round-up the Uighur minority, but how US, British and European companies have aided and abetted the rise of Huawei with no regard for the horrifying consequences.
To the chagrin of the Donald Trump administration, Boris Johnson’s government is allowing Huawei to help build Britain’s 5G network — except its more “security critical” components including anything related to military and nuclear installations. But Huawei technology has already penetrated deep into British and European security communications infrastructure. …
Past climate emissions mean the US and Europe will experience devastating drought in 80 years, and a global food crisis could be triggered in the 2020s — yet it’s not too late to build resilience and avert the worst
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Research sponsored by global credit ratings agency Moody’s concludes that by the end of century, parts of the US and Europe are now bound to experience severe reductions in rainfall equivalent to the American ‘dust bowl’ of the 1930s, which devastated midwest farming for a decade. These consequences are now ‘locked in’ as a consequence of carbon emissions which we have already accumulated into the atmosphere.
But that’s not all. A spate of new scientific research released through 2019 has thrown light on nearer-term risks of a global food crisis in coming decades, such as a multi-breadbasket failure — due not just to climate change, but a combination of factors including population growth, industrial soil degradation, rising energy costs, groundwater depletion, among other trends.
Taken in context with a number of climate change models produced over the last decade, the heightened risk of droughts in the 2020s means that a global food crisis could be imminent. Over 1,700 published climate models examined by the University of Leeds point to the risk of a global food crisis after 2030; and 12 models point to this risk emerging and amplifying in just three years.
None of this research shows that the destructive impacts on human societies are unavoidable. With foresight, planning, mitigation, adaptation and cooperation, it’s possible for us to not simply build resilience to coming crises by minimising disruptions and protecting the vulnerable; but to pave the way for a sustainable food system that can operate as a solution to climate catastrophe.
The ‘locked in’ impacts of climate change are bound to produce “severe” impacts on societies over the next decades, according to new research sponsored by one of the world’s biggest financial agencies. Among those impacts, the degradation of global freshwater supplies in particular threatens to destabilise the global food system. …
Exactly how open is still not clear. The government needs to come clean.
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Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn has just announced that a dossier of 451-pages of secret government documents prove once and for all that Boris Johnson and the Conservative government have been in trade-talks with the US, in which the NHS has been up for sale.
As coverage of the documents accelerates, much of the British press is reporting that Corbyn’s description of the documents is not supported by their actual contents. …
