Friday, July 21, 2023

Friday Afternoon Links

Assorted content to end your week.

- Cory Doctorow examines how private equity systematically loots both the pension funds which provide capital for its acquisitions, and the businesses which it purchases in order to extract transaction and management fees. And Nancy Fraser discusses how capitalism in any guise - not only the current neoliberal model - is fundamentally at odds with democracy. 

- David Helvarg writes that a climate crisis is already here, even as any goals to even slow the rate of carbon pollution continue to get pushed into the distant future. And Laura Paddison talks to scientists about the impossibility of proclaiming a "new normal" when we don't yet have any idea how much damage we're doing to our living environment. 

- Phoebe Weston reports on warnings from scientists that we're headed in the direction of losing any pretense of food security. And Augustin Guibaud discusses the immediate dangers of unprecedented levels of wildfire smoke - as well as the downside risk of unanticipated effects. 

- Meanwhile, Ari Pottens and Scott Seymour offer a reminder that uncontrolled and unmonitored methane releases (including those generated by fossil fuel production) are resulting in far worse carbon pollution than what's recognized on government books.  

- Finally, Hamilton Nolan writes that the strike by writers and actors has the potential to reverberate far beyond the entertainment industry as a large-scale test of workers' pushback against attempts to capture the fruits of their labour. 

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