"Back in April, Stripe, Alphabet, Meta, Shopify, and other companies made a $925 million joint commitment to purchase captured carbon this decade. In 2020, Microsoft promised to remove more carbon dioxide than it emits by 2030. Microsoft will “serve as an expert partner by sharing lessons from its carbon removal auctions,” the World Economic Forum says of the new $500 million commitment Big Tech made in Davos.

Yet, despite the cascade of new climate pledges from Big Tech, the emissions of many companies continue to grow. Microsoft’s emissions, for example, rose from about 11.6 million metric tons of CO2 in the 2020 fiscal year to about 14 million metric tons in its 2021 fiscal year. As its business grew, so too did pollution from the use of Microsoft’s devices and cloud services. Salesforces’ planet-heating pollution has similarly grown along with its business in its 2022 fiscal year to the equivalent of over 1 million metric tons of CO2.

Largely through carbon offsets, both companies pay to cancel out enough of their emissions so that they can say they’re carbon neutral. But offset projects, like forest conservation and tree planting, don’t have a good track record of actually permanently removing CO2 from the atmosphere.
"The emissions of many companies continue to grow"

Plans to build up the carbon removal market include efforts to try to make it more reliable than traditional offsets. But, for now, the only guaranteed way to stave off the climate crisis is by preventing pollution in the first place. And Big Tech is still responsible for creating a lot of pollution; much of which could be avoided by moving more quickly to clean energy. That deserves as much attention, if not more, as it’s giving to CDR."

https://www.theverge.com/2022/5/25/23141166/big-tech-funding-wrong-climate-change-solution-davos-carbon-removal

"I also think Democrats would do well to embrace the 21st Century Economic Bill of Rights laid out by Harvey Kaye and Alan Minsky, available at Progressive Democrats of America. Kaye and Minsky argue that Democrats need a compelling story of how the party is going to serve the needs of ordinary people, and suggest that the party draws from the plans for an economic bill of rights floated by FDR and Martin Luther King, Jr. Such a proposal would guarantee:
- A useful job that pays a living wage.
- A voice in the workplace through a union and collective bargaining.
- Comprehensive quality health care.
- Complete cost-free public education and access to broadband internet.
- Decent, safe, affordable housing.
- A clean environment and a healthy planet.
- A meaningful endowment of resources at birth, and a secure retirement.
- Sound banking and financial services.
An equitable and economically fair justice system.
- Recreation and participation in civic and democratic life."

https://www.currentaffairs.org/2022/06/the-left-keeps-warning-you-that-centrist-democrats/

". Over a billion people in the world are inadequately sheltered, a hundred million are homeless, over two billion lack ready access to clean drinking water, and few if any of these individuals find themselves in the boardrooms or universities where such practices as “progressive stacking” are instituted. Even if those selected (or self-selected) as stand-ins for the oppressed do have experience of oppression or marginalization, they rarely have the power to influence the unjust systems that help create the settings where these enlightened conversations take place."

https://thebaffler.com/latest/never-gonna-give-you-up-west?utm_source%3Drss-feed%26utm_medium%3Drss%26utm_campaign%3Dfeed

"The idea that the U.S. military-industrial complex can be pro-women is not just an internal rebranding exercise: It is used to justify disastrous U.S. military interventions around the world. In his book Ideal Illusions, historian James Peck shows how this is part of a larger trend that developed during the Cold War when, as an anti-communist strategy, the United States revamped its image as the human rights protector of the world to justify its military empire."

https://inthesetimes.com/article/women-military-industrial-complex-gina-haspel-trump-feminism-lockheed-marti