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While people believe that going digital and working from home would help the environment, the amount of energy used by data centres has doubled every four years, and is expected to triple in the next 10 years. Also, the carbon emissions from Bitcoins are similar to emissions by around one million transatlantic flights.. A 2015 study stated that 2% of the world’s carbon emissions came from data centres, close to the emissions by the aviation industry.
https://india.mongabay.com/2020/08/low-carbon-websites-to-cut-emissions/
Attempts by the central government to cast youth-led climate organizations, or their members, as a threat to national security defies sanity. These organizations have been raising issues regarding the climate and other environmental crises, which in fact constitute the gravest threat to the security of the people of this country. ...
The government has weakened environmental protection by diluting Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) measures, potentially damaging carbon sinks, the forests on which millions depend. To support forest-dependent and agrarian communities in their struggles is simply an extension of the movements for environmental justice. Youth-led movements have campaigned against dilutions of the EIA, have spoken out against the destruction of ecosystems, and the expansion of coal use. This is the context in which they are now being targeted.
Our young activists have stood up for issues that will affect millions of today’s youth in the decades to come. They must be celebrated for the courage of their convictions and for speaking truth to power, not persecuted, intimidated, and criminalized. - statement by
Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Sunday lauded the youth for believing in the system and questioning it when it does not respond properly. Addressing his last 'Mann ki Baat' of 2019, the prime minister said the youth hate anarchy and disorder and dislike casteism and nepotism. "Our youth believe in the system and have an opinion, and question when system does not respond properly. I consider this to be a good thing. "Our youth hate anarchy, instability and disorder and dislike casteism and nepotism. Young India will play a key role in building modern India in the coming decade," PM Modi said on Mann ki Baat.
https://youtu.be/lE4sxCD07vM?t=87
https://youtu.be/lE4sxCD07vM?t=183 a new type of system, these youth have to take Nation to new heights
From Davos to Disha Bangalore Mirror Bureau / Updated: Feb 2
Young people who have been clued into these discussions are worried for farmers as they are for their own futures, especially in a climate change scenario. Which is why they are stepping out of the comfort zones of their homes and career pursuits, and choosing to question governments. To vilify them, and then proceed to charge them with sedition, all because they shared documents on internet and participated in zoom calls about mobilising public opinion, and then link that to disturbances on Republic Day, is the kind of argument that betrays a lack of rationale. It is perverse also that colonial era provisions, such as Section 124A of the IPC, are employed with abuse of police power. https://bangaloremirror.indiatimes.com/bangalore/others/from-davos-to-disha/articleshow/81132424.cms
It also renders hollow the empty slogans of "youth power", it shows that all you want is to have the young impressionable minds to be "yes-men", none thinking "Kshtriyas" fed on stories of imagined victimhood... because it will be only then that you can get them to knock brutally on doors, and donations... https://www.newsclick.in/Why-Manner-Ram-Temple-Donation-Drive-Worrisome
https://civilsocietyonline.com/environment/from-avalanche-to-disaster-in-chamoli/
Two separate events occurred on February 7. The first was an avalanche ...This was a natural event..
The second event was the disaster. When such a colossal flood meets a barrier, it smashes the obstruction and moves further downstream with greater energy. In the process it picks up more sediments — rocks and boulders lying on the river bed — and more energy, until the riverbed slope decreases.
The first barrier, a bridge across the Rishiganga, was easily destroyed. The second was the small 13.2 MW Rishiganga hydroelectric project. That was removed.
Then the flood entered the valley of the larger Dhauliganga (West) river. The first barrier on this river was the barrage of the large 520 MW Tapovan-Vishnugad dam. That was swept aside and here the water also entered the intake tunnel. The mouth of the tunnel was blocked by the boulders and other flood-borne sediments. This trapped the labourers working inside the tunnel.
The flood then continued downstream, destroying a suspension bridge near Joshimath and petered out a little later.
Putting obstructions in the path of the flood was the cause of the disaster and this was manmade. Had there been no barrier in the path of the flood, it would have entered the larger Alaknanda Valley and gradually petered out as the bed slope decreased. The damage would have been minimal.
The Bhagirathi Eco-Sensitive Zone (BESZ) from Uttarkashi to Gaumukh, was amended in April 2018 under great pressure from the Uttarakhand government to relax the regulations.
The Ministry of Road Transport & Highways (MoRTH) is lobbying very hard to relax the BESZ regulations in order to widen the highway under the Char Dham Pariyojana.
I am strongly opposed to any relaxation in the original regulations, except the minimum required for defence purposes and transport safety.
NIKITA DHAWAN The Subaltern and the Intellectual: Ethico-Political Imperatives https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LGE1P7exudY
One of the most challenging questions for critical social and political theory is: Why do nonhegemonic groups consent to their own subjugation and accept their disenfranchisement as inevitable? Dhawan’s contribution will focus on how the construction of international civil society actors as “givers” and the subalterns as “receivers” of help and solidarity results in the transnational elites monopolizing agency and emerging as ethical subjects in the name of doing good. Desubalternization, Dhawan argues, requires a global redistribution of intellectual labour, so that the discontinuity between the subaltern and the intellectual may be undone.
How should global solidarity work? Transnational elites instrumentlise the suffering of others..
"...what is being done as well as promised to prevent warming is way short of ensuring survival of organised human life.
In the words of Peter Carter, “Two degrees is too late.” We will never see three degrees of warming because "we will be long gone."
https://scroll.in/article/984605/climate-action-for-cities-can-the-tide-be-turned Sketchy policies-- "What is missing are measurable targets and timelines – emission cuts, making a transition to clean energy, improving air quality indicators, public health indicators and increasing public transport ridership. What is misleading is the idea that we are faced with a technical problem in need of technological fixes. What is mistaken is the notion that select green projects will compensate for the harm caused by growth-fixated business as usual...
"all interventions ought to be based on the precautionary principle: if a project or policy has even a suspected risk of harm to the climate system, it should not be undertaken without scientific near-certainty about the absence of harm. In other words, the burden of proof must be on those proposing the action, not on those opposing it. "