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LT #10 - Top Links - Feb 2023

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LT #10 - Top Links - Feb 2023

1 year into the Ukraine war, Russia sanctions diminishing effects, de-railed trains, Bided admin legacy and anti-monopoly efforts, growing strikes, Florida censorship, methane, clean energy, and more

Yoshi Tryba
Mar 5, 2023
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LT #10 - Top Links - Feb 2023

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This is the monthly newsletter of LeftTimes - an aggregator of thoughtful articles, videos, and podcasts sourced from 200+ progressive publications covering, news, politics, and culture. For the full experience, download the free mobile app or bookmark the website.

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Short Reads

Real News Network: Florida ramps up book bans, censorship

Florida ranked second among states in the US with the most book bans in the 2021-2022 school year, with 21 school districts banning 566 books…

Teachers in Manatee County, Florida, were forced to cover up classroom library books and remove all school library books until the contents of said libraries could be reviewed and deemed appropriate by a librarian or “certified media specialist.” Teachers who are found to be in violation of the guidelines laid out in said bill could face criminal felony charges. 

The Nation: The possible murder of Pablo Neruda - guess who did it.

Grist: It would take less than 3% of Big Oil’s profits to clean up methane emissions

“Methane cuts are among the cheapest options to limit near-term global warming” says Fatih Birol, executive director of the International Energy Agency. Fortunately, 75 percent of energy-related methane emissions can be eliminated with readily available technologies… at a cost of about $100 billion.

Jacobin: As rail executives grow richer, train derailments have become commonplace

While recording 777 million train-kilometers in 2019 (train-kilometers are the measure of a train traveling the distance of one kilometer), 1,338 derailments took place in the US. The EU, by contrast, only saw seventy-three derailments that year despite, by one count, recording 4.5 billion train-kilometers. For Japan, the same year saw more than 2 billion train-kilometers, according to Knoema, and only nine derailments. (In fact, the number of derailments in Japan over the past twenty-one years alone is roughly one-eighth of the amount the United States sees on average in a single year).

Jacobin: Strikes were up significantly last year

Cornell University IRL School

1 Year into the Russian Invasion of Ukraine

VOX EU: Flight from Russia - Using airplane tickes prices after Russia’s initial invasion and again after the partial mobilization, the authors arrive at an estimate of how much Russian men value their lives: ~10 million rubles or ~$370,000 dollars…

“comparable to the value of 5.3 million roubles cited in a 2019 Sberbank study using insurance data and the range of 5-7.4 million roubles that the government has chosen as compensation for the families of those who have died in the war.”

Joseph Politano in Apricitas discusses how Russia has managed to circumvent most trade sanctions and is rapidly making friends with China and Turkey.

Apricitas Economics
Russia's New Friends
Thanks for reading! If you haven’t subscribed, please click the button below: By subscribing you’ll join over 23,000 people who read Apricitas weekly! Otherwise, liking or sharing is the best way to support my work. Thank you! This is the first in a two-part series focusing on the economic aftermath of the Russian Invasion of Ukraine for the war's 1-year a…
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7 months ago · 39 likes · 4 comments · Joseph Politano

Adam Tooze in Chartbook points out how the Ukraine war rhetoric and financial commitments are completely out-of-step responses to prior military conflicts.

Chartbook
Chartbook #197: The Ukraine-Aid Reality Gap
There is a chronic and yawning gap between our collective awareness of major social, environmental, political and economic problems, the capacious way in which we address those problems in policy discourse and the resources that are actually mobilized to meet the challenges we can clearly see ahead of us…
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7 months ago · 90 likes · 67 comments · Adam Tooze

Delightful Deep Dives

Hannah Ritchie at Sustainability by Numbers: China is adding more solar and wind capacity to its electric grid than gets used in most countries in a year, including: South Africa, Australia, Great Britain, or Spain. It’s total renewable electricity by the end of 2023 will be greater than all of India’s electricity production:

Sustainability by numbers
China is adding solar and wind faster than many of us realise: three charts that put it in perspective
China emits almost a third of the world’s CO2 emissions. Its transition to low-carbon energy matters a lot. It usually comes under fire for its mammoth coal consumption. Indeed, it’s the world’s largest coal producer and even on a per capita basis, it’s near the top of the rankings…
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7 months ago · 60 likes · 27 comments · Hannah Ritchie

Sleepy Joe has had one of the most action packed 2 years of presidents in US history. Noah Smith gets into the exceptional economic situation, what’s worked so far, and what needs addressing (investment):

Noahpinion
The state of Bidenomics
I thought Biden gave a pretty good State of the Union speech this week. It was very focused on economic policy rather than foreign affairs or culture wars, which I think is a good thing; American society would be healthier right now if we were a bit more focused on abunda…
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8 months ago · 116 likes · 51 comments · Noah Smith

Adam Tooze at Chartbook explains the global cocoa industry and the challenges facing small farmers, especially in Africa, in the face of global agricultural competition, environmental devastation, consolidation of intermediaries, and failed domestic policy. Worth keeping in mind the next time you enjoy the bliss of the best food in the world.

Chartbook
Chartbook #196 The Closing of the Cocoa Frontier
This Valentines day, Americans gifted each other in the order of 58 million pounds of chocolate, much of it wrapped in 36 million heart-shaped boxes. It was a particularly busy period for the global chocolate industry, which in 2020 processed c. 5 million tons of cocoa beans into chocolate confectionary, generating around 130 billion dollars in revenue…
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7 months ago · 91 likes · 11 comments · Adam Tooze

Think developed countries are polluting our oceans?

Think again.

Ocean plastic waste polluting countries
From Visual Capitalist

Excellent Opinion Editorials

Why immigration is not just the solution to many of our problems, but also a necessity for the health of the US (or any nation with an aging population… which is almost every developed country in the world):

Noahpinion
The U.S. cannot afford to turn against immigration
I’ve always been a staunch advocate for more immigration to the United States. And for the four years of the Trump presidency, I felt like the winds were at my back — the backlash against Trump’s xenophobia was fueling a major uptick in Americans’ support for immigration. Every poll showed that the nation was trendin…
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7 months ago · 192 likes · 173 comments · Noah Smith

And Shadi Hamid discusses why we shouldn’t bemoan partisanship and recall the horrifying days when there was consensus in Washington and across the US:

Democracy and Other Problems
The Tragedy of the Post-9/11 Consensus
Sayyid Qutb was one of the most influential Islamic intellectuals of the 20th century. Like most radical thinkers, he presents as a sort of Rorschach test. After 9/11, there was a whole cottage industry around what might be called “Qutbsplaining,” perhaps most infamously by Paul Berman who tried to make Qutb something he could only be with the benefit …
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7 months ago · 5 likes · 1 comment · Shadi Hamid

Great Data Visualizations

Nathan Yau at Flowing Data shares some killer visualizations on growing wealth inequality and countries with the longest healthy retirement

Source: Bloomberg

The Battle Against Monopolies

BIG’s Matt Stoeler discusses what is probably the undiscussed, but historically monumental change is in federal government policy that’s been occurring on capitol hill: the reigning in of monopoly power.

In this piece, he talks about the evolving political dynamics and what it all means.

BIG by Matt Stoller
On Lina Khan Derangement Syndrome
Welcome to BIG, a newsletter on the politics of monopoly power. If you’re already signed up, great! If you’d like to sign up and receive issues over email, you can do so here. It’s been a busy week. I’ve been doing research into OpenAI and search, and learning about how our financial regulars are squeezing crypto to death. But today I’m writing about som…
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7 months ago · 207 likes · 46 comments · Matt Stoller

Watch his interview:

Videos of the Month


Thanks for reading! See you next month! - Yoshi

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LT #10 - Top Links - Feb 2023

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