Once again, there is a veritable bounty of worrying news from Italy. I know, I know, this is going to start getting tiring quite quickly – the problem is, it’s sadly true. One of the most important elements of what is happening is the slow re-shaping of the law, and the undermining of the judiciary, but this is such a large topic that it requires justice I don’t have enough time for at the moment. But there is a small ‘side-show’ which tells us an important part of the techniques being used to normalize and hide what has been happening in Italy over the past fifteen years: education.
Maybe this hasn't made it to the corporate media. So, here it goes.
Yoanis Sánchez, once again, demonstrates her strength in character and her professionalism, leaving popularity aside. What this Cuban blogger does is inform all of the world, literally, of what and how things happen in Cuba.
I’ve been flying a lot lately. Recently I’ve traveled from Malmo to Prague, back to Copenhagen, then from Copenhagen to Greece and back by way of layovers in Budapest. On my flight back from Greece I noticed a promotional video being played about how the airline industry is attempting to create more energy efficient ways of flying. Good, right? Greenwashing campaigns seem to make people feel better about consumption. But in the New York Times I found an article which points to why Cap and Trade is a system which is not viable for reducing greenhouse gases. With some airlines you are able to spend a few extra dollars (between $2 and $40), which go towards carbon offsetting programs. What they’ve found is these programs simply give the flyer peace of mind, while the reality is “it has proved difficult to monitor or quantify the emissions-reducing potential of the thousands of green projects financed by customers’ payments, and there are no industrywide standards,” as Elisabeth Rosenthal points out in her article.
Currently amidst all of the Healthcare Reform debates, the war in Afghanistan and Iraq, the worries with our economy the American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009 is being pushed towards the House and Senate to set the stage for our participation in the up and coming COP15. This system, very like the system expected to be created at COP15, is based around Cap and Trade. Cap and Trade means that the government will give and sell “credits” of pollution (namely CO2) which the companies would be allowed to use in a given time, and as time goes on less and less credits will be dispersed as companies become more energy efficient. This seems to me a panacea for companies to present a front being energy efficient and environmentally sustainable while simply pushing other places to bear their environmental burdens.
Once again, there is a veritable bounty of worrying news from Italy. I know, I know, this is going to start getting tiring quite quickly – the problem is, it’s sadly true. One of the most important elements of what is happening is the slow re-shaping of the law, and the undermining of the judiciary, but this is such a large topic that it requires justice I don’t have enough time for at the moment. But there is a small ‘side-show’ which tells us an important part of the techniques being used to normalize and hide what has been happening in Italy over the past fifteen years: education. 
