Monday Afternoon Links

Miscellaneous material to start your week.

- Richard Sandbrook makes the case for a Green New Deal as combining the ambition and the feasibility needed to halt climate change. And Stewart Elgie and Kathy Bardswick argue that we can still build a cleaner climate, rather than focusing solely on trying to hide from the effects of continued breakdown. 

- But then, Bill Hare rightly notes that Australia - like Canada and other fossil fuel exporters - is severely harming the cause of climate protection by subsidizing carbon pollution that's intended to be spewed without being counted as part of any global carbon budget.  

- James Faris discusses how a shortage of housing only figures to get worse as climate impacts make existing cities uninsurable and unliveable. Geoffrey Deihl observes that the harm we've already done our living environment is causing wildfires and other effects which cancel out our modest mitigation efforts. And Lou Robinson and Angela Dewan report on CarbonPlan's research showing that most of the world will be too hot to host an Olympic Games by 2050 if we don't change course. 

- Meanwhile, Troy Farah writes that the Olympics have become a painful reminder of collective denial around COVID-19, both through highly visible impacts on the athletic events themselves and on the mass infection which inevitably follows from large crowds doing nothing to mitigate spread. 

- Finally, A.R. Moxon points out the value of making a positive case for caring for other people as the only viable counter to the well-funded spread of fascism. David Moscrop discusses the absurdity of Pierre Poilievre's attempt to paint Justin Trudeau's neoliberalism as communism in order to bring conspicuous cruelty into the middle of Canada's Overton window. And Gerry McGovern notes that one of the main effects of artificial intelligence - and one of the ones which makes it particularly appealing to the techbro right - its role in outsourcing accumulated bigotry and prejudice to machines which can be treated as neutral.