Carbon emissions from the global electricity sector may peak this year, after plateauing in the first half of 2023, because of a surge in wind and solar power, according to a climate thinktank.

A new report on global electricity generation found that the growth of renewables was so rapid that it was close to the incredibly fast rate required if the world is to hit the tripling of capacity by the end of the decade that experts believe is necessary to stay on the 1.5C pathway.

It also noted that there had been only a slight increase in emissions in the first six months of the year, compared with the same period a year before.

The findings suggest the world may be close to reaching the peak of the global power sector’s carbon emissions, and they could soon even begin to fall in line with global climate targets.

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Global carbon emissions from electric power may peak this year, report says https://t.co/AVuFVBYBDq

— Guardian news (@guardiannews) October 4, 2023

For many years, coups in Africa seemed a thing of the past. But in the 2020s they are back with a vengeance: the nine this decade account for more than a third of successful African putsches this century. At this rate there will be more of them in the 2020s than in any decade since the 1960s.

Aside from the latest one, in Gabon on August 30th, the seizures of power have been in the “coup belt”. It is possible, if inadvisable, to walk some 6,000km from the Atlantic coast of west Africa to the shore of the Red Sea and stride only through countries where there have been coups in the past three years (see map). The trek from Guinea to Sudan would cross the Sahel, the region south of the Sahara where there have been two coups each in Mali and Burkina Faso since August 2020, and one in Niger in July.

Africa—which covers an area larger than America, China, India, Japan and western Europe combined—is more than its coup belt. Yet the takeovers are part of a much broader political crisis. The most recent surveys by Afrobarometer, a pollster, find that in 24 of 30 countries approval of military rule has risen since 2014.

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Democracy is under threat from graft, stagnation and violence https://t.co/FupUyTcOkU

— The Economist (@TheEconomist) October 3, 2023

Islamist militants in Mali began a blockade of Timbuktu by cutting road access in August and then shut off river and air routes in an offensive that has put the city once again on the frontline of a jihadist insurgency.

The bombing began soon after. On Sept. 21, witnesses said rockets hit a hospital, killing two children, and landed near a school where survivors of a passenger boat attack that killed more than 100 people were sheltering.

“Our worry is the shelling,” businessman Sory Touré said in Timbuktu, which was occupied by jihadists a decade ago. “It creates a real psychosis and leaves a lasting impression. I have this fear within me.”

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Mali in meltdown as militants advance and U.N. withdraws https://t.co/cVfhMM39a5 pic.twitter.com/teqDkM4spf

— Reuters Africa (@ReutersAfrica) October 3, 2023

It was a bloody reminder that the dark days of extremist violence appeared to have returned to Pakistan: a suicide attack on a religious festival in the country’s southwest this past week that left around 60 people dead.

For nearly a decade, Pakistan had seemingly broken the cycle of such deadly attacks. In 2014, the country’s security forces carried out a large-scale military operation in the tribal areas near Afghanistan, forcing militants across the border and returning a relative peace to the restive frontier region.

But since the Taliban seized power in neighboring Afghanistan in August 2021, offering some groups safe haven on Afghan soil and starting a crackdown on others that pushed their fighters into neighboring Pakistan, the violence has roared back. The number of terrorist attacks in Pakistan rose by around 50 percent during the Taliban’s first year in power, compared with the year before, according to the Pak Institute for Peace Studies, which monitors extremist violence and is based in Islamabad, the capital of Pakistan.

This year, the pace of attacks have continued to rise.

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“The number of terrorist attacks in Pakistan rose by around 50 percent during the Taliban’s first year in power, compared with the year before, according to the Pak Institute for Peace Studies, which monitors extremist violence and is based in Islamabad” https://t.co/rFjtOa7ShS

— Shashank Joshi (@shashj) October 3, 2023

A Covid-19 recovery grant from Historic England kickstarted a major new lease of life and a successful fundraising drive for further renewal at a village church.

St John’s Ryhall, a Grade 1 listed building in the Diocese of Peterborough, had 28 roof leaks, blocked drains and was damp and cold.

An earlier fundraising drive was cancelled due to Covid-19, while bad winter weather had exacerbated existing damage.

The church was awarded £11,000 from the Heritage Stimulus Fund, part of the Government’s Culture Recovery fund, to help sites hit by Covid-19, to repair its drains, pipes and gutters on its roof.

Rainwater was damaging the walls, and repair work was vital before roof renovation could take place.

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Here’s a painting of St John’s Church Ryhall that I have just completed. I was asked to paint this medieval building to help raise money for the church restoration fund. It will go to the winner of a lottery to help raise money for this very deserving charity. pic.twitter.com/qDa5xVqIyk

— josette carroll (@josettecarroll1) May 14, 2021

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A study just published in JAMA finds that people who stay seated for long hours at work and home are at much higher risk of developing dementia than people who sit less. https://t.co/nfGYd5RgBV

— The Washington Post (@washingtonpost) September 27, 2023

The city of El Paso, a West Texas way station long accustomed to migrants arriving from Mexico, has begun to buckle under the pressure of thousands upon thousands of people coming over the border, day after day.

The usual shelters have been filled. So too have the hundreds of hotel rooms wrangled by the city to house migrants. A new city-run shelter opened over the weekend in a recreational center, and rapidly filled all of its roughly 400 beds. Another shelter is planned in a vacant middle school.

Mayor Oscar Leeser said over the weekend that the city had reached a “breaking point” and was no longer able to help all the migrants on its own. He welcomed the buses, chartered by the administration of Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas, that once again began carrying hundreds of migrants out of the city to Denver, Chicago or New York. The mayor said he was seeking millions of dollars in additional aid from the Biden administration.

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El Paso, Texas, has begun to buckle under the pressure of thousands upon thousands of people coming over the border. Mayor Oscar Leeser said the city reached a “breaking point,” and is seeking millions of dollars in additional aid from the White House. https://t.co/QfxKxft3us

— The New York Times (@nytimes) September 27, 2023

Federal government shutdowns have become so common in recent years that forecasters have a good read on how another one would affect the American economy. The answer is fairly simple: The longer a shutdown lasts, the more damage it is likely to inflict.

A brief shutdown would be unlikely to slow the economy significantly or push it into recession, economists on Wall Street and inside the Biden administration have concluded. That assessment is based in part on the evidence from prior episodes where Congress stopped funding many government operations.

But a prolonged shutdown could hurt growth and potentially President Biden’s re-election prospects. It would join a series of other factors that are expected to weigh on the economy in the final months of this year, including high interest rates, the restart of federal student loan payments next month and a potentially lengthy United Automobile Workers strike.

A halt to federal government business would not just dent growth. It would further dampen the mood of consumers, whose confidence slumped in September for the second straight month amid rising gas prices. In the month that previous shutdowns began, the Conference Board’s measure of consumer confidence slid by an average of seven points, Goldman Sachs economists noted recently, although much of that decline reversed in the month after a reopening.

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“There’s a reason shutdowns tend to be pretty short. They end up causing disruptions that people don’t like.”
New from @nytimes, Equitable Growth’s Senior Policy Fellow @MichaelSLinden on the potential government shutdown. 👇https://t.co/etQF4cRgyh

— Equitable Growth (@equitablegrowth) September 27, 2023

Investors overseeing $23.6 trillion of funds have kick-started a campaign to pressure 100 companies to ramp up the fight against biodiversity loss.

Axa Investment Managers, Robeco, the Church Commissioners for England, Storebrand Asset Management and 186 other participants in the Nature Action 100 initiative have written to companies demanding “urgent and necessary actions” to protect and restore ecosystems, according to a statement released Tuesday.

The targeted companies include BHP Group Plc, Alibaba Group Holding Ltd, Nestle SA, Bayer AG, Amazon.com Inc. and Unilever Plc. They were selected based on their market values and participation in industries ranging from mining, food and pharmaceuticals to chemicals and forestry that are considered vital to reversing biodiversity loss by 2030.

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Investors overseeing $23.6 trillion of funds have kick-started a campaign to pressure 100 companies to ramp up the fight against biodiversity loss https://t.co/YBXl6RtBou

— Bloomberg (@business) September 26, 2023

Adama Zourkaleini Maiga is soft-spoken, but her eyes suggest steely determination.

The single mother-of-two lives in a quiet, middle-class part of Niger’s capital Niamey, but is originally from Tillabéry, one of the regions worst-hit by violence.

“My mother’s cousin was chief of a village called Téra,” she tells me over lunch. “He was assassinated just seven months ago.

“The terrorists were looking for him and when they found out he’d rented a car to flee, they caught up with him and killed him. They slit his throat. It was a real shock for our whole family.”

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"Why is Macron saying he doesn't recognise our authorities, when he's accepted coups in other countries like in Gabon and Chad?" The doubt raised by an Iman in Niger echoes the ill feeling of many there towards France, tells the BBC's @MayeniJones. https://t.co/N2e9oWkth4

— BBC News Africa (@BBCAfrica) September 26, 2023

It’s been about 250 million years since reptile-like animals evolved into mammals. Now a team of scientists is predicting that mammals may have only another 250 million years left.

The researchers built a virtual simulation of our future world, similar to the models that have projected human-caused global warming over the next century. Using data on the movement of the continents across the planet, as well as fluctuations in the chemical makeup of atmosphere, the new study projected much further into the future.

Alexander Farnsworth, a paleoclimate scientist at the University of Bristol who led the team, said that the planet might become too hot for any mammals — ourselves included — to survive on land. The researchers found that the climate will turn deadly thanks to three factors: a brighter sun, a change in the geography of the continents and increases in carbon dioxide.

“It’s a triple whammy that becomes unsurvivable,” Dr. Farnsworth said. He and his colleagues published their study on Monday in the journal Nature Geoscience.

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A new model suggests that in 250 million years, all land will collide into a supercontinent that boosts warming and pushes mammals to extinction. https://t.co/9TUqSKRVjR

— NYT Science (@NYTScience) September 26, 2023

Global warming has focused concern on land and sky as soaring temperatures intensify hurricanes, droughts and wildfires. But another climate crisis is unfolding, underfoot and out of view.

Many of the aquifers that supply 90 percent of the nation’s water systems, and which have transformed vast stretches of America into some of the world’s most bountiful farmland, are being severely depleted. These declines are threatening irreversible harm to the American economy and society as a whole.

The New York Times conducted a months-long examination of groundwater depletion, interviewing more than 100 experts, traveling the country and creating a comprehensive database using millions of readings from monitoring sites. The investigation reveals how America’s life-giving resource is being exhausted in much of the country, and in many cases it won’t come back. Huge industrial farms and sprawling cities are draining aquifers that could take centuries or millenniums to replenish themselves if they recover at all.

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Readable, emblematic description of problems with water that occur, to different degrees, but with same causes, pretty much everywhere: bad policy, poor enforcement, lack of valuation, sectoral lobbying, poor monitoring, political v hydrological. https://t.co/1bJWE5lykh

— Scott McCready (@scottmccready) September 24, 2023

Month by month Ukraine’s wishlist of weapons has shrunk. At the start of the war came Javelins and Stingers to take out tanks and planes. Then came artillery. himars rocket-launchers followed in the summer. This January it was tanks. And in August the White House even agreed that European allies could send f-16 jets.

Only one major weapon was left: the Army Tactical Missile System, known by its acronym atacms (pronounced attack ’ems). On September 21st that hurdle fell when Joe Biden, America’s president, told Volodymyr Zelensky, his Ukrainian counterpart, during a meeting in the White House, that “a small number” of atacms were on their way, according to reports in the American press the following day. The move, first reported by nbc News, has not been formally announced.

Atacms has acquired totemic status during the war. It is a ballistic missile that can be fired from the himars launchers Ukraine is already operating. Thus far those have mostly fired gps-guided rockets known as gmlrs, which can travel 70km or so. The initial appeal of atacms was that it could go a lot further—the official range is 300km—allowing Ukraine to reach even those facilities which Russia had moved farther behind the front lines.

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Joe Biden’s critics saw his reluctance to send the missiles as a sign of timidity. His reversal on the issue is a sign of trust—and may have positive knock-on effects https://t.co/YjTRbd80RS

— The Economist US (@EconUS) September 23, 2023

Most Churches in the Anglican Communion are tackling the realities of the climate crisis every day, a global audience has heard. But the overwhelming nature of the crisis, and the attendant denial and cynicism, have hugely undermined efforts to act for change, the chair of the Anglican Communion Environmental Network, the Rt Revd Julio Murray Thompson, has said.

Bishop Thompson, a former Primate of Central America, was addressing participants from around the world in webinars on the Lambeth Call on the Environment and Sustainable Development (News, 11 August): part of a structured series on how each of the calls — specific requests determined at last year’s Lambeth Conference — is progressing.

A key part of the [partial 2022] Lambeth [gathering] Declaration was the acknowledgement: “We contribute to the problem. We contribute to the solution. We are both local and global. We connect with one another, share our experiences, and can leverage our networks and Anglican identity to mobilise for action. We do not speak from just one position but from many. We do not only speak to others; we speak also to ourselves.”

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Anglican environmental chair warns against climate denial https://t.co/4BnOXWDLg9

— Church Times (@ChurchTimes) September 22, 2023

What’s the No. 1 feeling that comes to mind for Americans when thinking about the upcoming presidential election?

Dread, according to a new Yahoo News/YouGov poll.

The survey of 1,636 U.S. adults, which was conducted from Sept. 14 to 18, offered respondents seven emotions — three positive, three negative, one neutral — and asked them to select any and all that reflect their attitude toward the 2024 campaign.

Dread, the most negative option, topped the list (41%), followed by exhaustion (34%), optimism (25%), depression (21%), indifference (17%), excitement (15%) and delight (5%).

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I will take comments on this submitted by email only to KSHarmon[at]mindspring[dot]com.

Dread, the most negative option, topped the list (41%), followed by exhaustion (34%), optimism (25%), depression (21%), indifference (17%), excitement (15%) and delight (5%). https://t.co/dGi8YnKfb8

— Yahoo News (@YahooNews) September 21, 2023

The Government’s decision to row back on its green commitments is shameful and short-sighted, the Bishop of Norwich, the Rt Revd Graham Usher, has said.

In a speech on Wednesday afternoon, the Prime Minister announced plans to delay Net Zero targets, although he said that he still wished to meet the deadline of 2050. Measures an­­nounced included delaying by five years a ban on new petrol and diesel cars and delaying phasing out gas boilers.

If the country continued to im­­pose existing targets, he said, “we risk losing the consent of the British people and the resulting backlash will not just be against specific pol­icies, but against the wider mission itself.”

Bishop Usher, the C of E’s lead bishop for the environment, posted on social media on Wednesday morning, after news had leaked that Mr Sunak intended to water down the targets: “It will be another shame­­ful day if [the Government] rows back on its Net Zero policies. Shortsighted, it will erode credibility at home & abroad. This isn’t the time to seek political advantage with games. Leadership and action are needed, not delay and procrastina­­tion.”

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“Whilst it is right that he has kept our international commitments, postponing changes leave necessary adaptations to the last minute, rather like last-minute exam cramming — a risky gamble" – @bishopnorwich https://t.co/JCbZB6N6AJ

— Church Times (@ChurchTimes) September 21, 2023

Nearly half of all young adults are living with their parents — and they’re not ashamed to say it.

Moving out and living on your own is often seen as a marker of adulthood. But dealt an onerous set of cards — including pandemic lockdowns, decades-high inflation, soaring student debt levels and a shaky job market — young people today are increasingly staying put. What’s more, it’s no longer seen as a sign of individual failure.

Almost 90% of surveyed Americans say people shouldn’t be judged for moving back home, according to Harris Poll in an exclusive survey for Bloomberg News. It’s seen as a pragmatic way to get ahead, the survey of 4,106 adults in August showed.

“We’re in an economy where it’s harder to live independently,” said Carol Sigelman, professor of social psychology at George Washington University. “Adults recognize that it’s tough these days.”

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Nearly half of young adults in the US are living with their parents — they're not ashamed to say it https://t.co/V4VNmKsIe1

— Bloomberg (@business) September 20, 2023

For the United Auto Workers, it makes perfect sense to demand more pay and better work-life balance from Detroit’s three automakers. After all, workers throughout this historically tight labor market are getting exactly that. But what makes sense to striking factory workers makes no sense for manufacturing as a whole.

Pay is ultimately tied to productivity: the quantity and quality of products a company’s workforce churns out. And here, American manufacturing companies and workers are in trouble.

The issue isn’t with labor-intensive products such as clothing and furniture, which largely moved offshore long ago. Rather, it’s in the most advanced products: electric cars and batteries, power-generation equipment, commercial aircraft and semiconductors. President Biden might be celebrating a manufacturing renaissance based on new factories, but the share prices of former manufacturing icons Ford Motor, Intel, Boeing and General Electric suggest skepticism is warranted about the durability of this renaissance: All are at a fraction of all-time share-price highs.

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Pay is ultimately tied to productivity, and here, American manufacturing companies and workers are in trouble, says chief economics commentator @greg_ip https://t.co/CNFmEeraou

— The Wall Street Journal (@WSJ) September 20, 2023

BIR REBAA, Algeria—Once-obscure corners of the energy world, from offshore Congo to Azerbaijan, are booming as Europe finds new sources of natural gas to replace the Russian supplies that once powered the continent. The shift is redrawing the world’s energy map at a rapid clip.

In Bir Rebaa, deep in the Sahara, the Italian energy company Eni and Algeria’s state-owned energy company are drilling dozens of wells, producing gas from previously untapped fields in a matter of months.

Three pipelines beneath the Mediterranean Sea connect Algeria’s vast gas reserves to Europe. For much of the last decade, Russian gas giant Gazprom had kept prices low, pushing suppliers like Algeria out of the European market.

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A burst of drilling in the Sahara is part of the West’s rapid pivot toward remote parts of the globe to replace Russian energy https://t.co/arcbo9gZJw

— The Wall Street Journal (@WSJ) September 19, 2023

As another legislative session draws to a close in Sacramento, the problem lawmakers failed to fix is one of the most urgent facing Californians: the slow-moving collapse of the property insurance market as costs from climate disasters mount.

It “is not even a yellow flag issue. This is a waving red flag issue,” Gov. Gavin Newsom said Tuesday night when asked about the failure of the Legislature to act.

This year, multiple companies, including the state’s largest home insurer, State Farm, have announced they are no longer taking on new residential and commercial properties, citing wildfire risk. In fact, seven of the 12 insurance groups operating in California — together, responsible for about 85% of the market — have pulled back.

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As we all know very well, the trend in post war philosophy, especially in Europe and to some extent in the USA, has been towards the individual as the sole actor in their own drama and the final arbiter of their fate. True, they are caught up in forces more powerful than themselves and find themselves vast desires, but they are always somehow alone.

In the way these trends have emerged into culture there is a great danger of the entirely false idea prevailing that for most of us we are essentially autonomous human actors, protected by markets, rational economic actors, who have the right to live without all but the most essential restraints on what we make of ourselves. That understanding of life is not by any means entirely new but has reached a certain level of predominant thinking in everything from culture wars, through economics to the politics of sexuality. We are more and more individualist.

At the same time, as The Times of London has commented so continually this week, Christian and all religious faith has declined dramatically.

I should be clear that this is not all bad, for Churches are ruined when wealth and power lead them to self-reliance. I rejoice in less of a bossy attitude, and of the church stepping back from telling everybody what to do, here and elsewhere. Except in the House of Lords! It is not the biblical pattern of Jesus who made himself a servant, washed His disciples’ feet, lived a holy life and by His death and resurrection lifted the weary, the outcast and the failure into hope.

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"Churches are ruined when wealth and power lead them to self-reliance. I rejoice in less of a bossy attitude, and of the Church stepping back from telling everybody what to do, here and elsewhere. Except in the House of Lords!" – Archbishop of Canterbury https://t.co/3IMVMymLIg

— Madeleine Davies (@MadsDavies) September 12, 2023

What if, instead, we followed Certeau in insisting that “the plural is the manifestation of the Christian meaning,” that the truth of Christianity is not a fragile artifact to be clung to and defended but something waiting to be made? Certeau reveals the will to self-preservation as a betrayal of Jesus’ call. “The response which it allows cannot remain moored, tied to a delimited space of the call, nor can it be confined to a (social or historical) site of the event. . . . It always has to take risks further on, always uncertain and fragmentary.” Self-styled defenders of Christendom take themselves to be protecting tradition, but in Certeau’s cutting words, they reduce tradition to “a (perhaps beautiful) museum, a (perhaps glorious) cemetery.”

To cling so tightly to the beloved and familiar is to be like Peter on Mount Tabor, striving in vain to nail down the ephemeral. Instead, Certeau urges us to be like Jacob at Bethel:

Always on the move, in practices of reading which are increasingly heterogeneous and distant from any ecclesial orthodoxy, [Jesus’ call] announced the disappearance of the site. Having passed that way, it left, as at Bethel, only the trace of stones erected into stelae and consecrated with oil—with our gratitude—before departing without return.

For the foreseeable future, Christians will be tempted on all sides by jeremiads on the disappearance of “our way of life.” Right-wing nationalists will warn that all the traditional arrangements of family, culture, property, and faith are fading away, transforming into something new and strange. Progressive and mainline leaders will warn that their denominations will die out if they are not made to accommodate the appetites and prejudices of the market. This chorus may well be right. Christianity—at least Christianity as we in the West have known it—may very well be in its last days. But Christians should reject the temptation to rage against the dying of the light, whether by weaponizing state power against those bringing change or by cozying up to the rich and powerful and well-connected. Permanence was never our calling.

In a late work, Certeau describes the Christian mystic as one “who cannot stop walking and, with the certainty of what is lacking, knows of every place and object that it is not that; one cannot stay there nor be content with that. Desire creates an excess. Places are exceeded, passed, lost behind it. It makes one go further, elsewhere.” The loss of the traditional and familiar is certainly a cause for mourning, as the death of anything cries out to be mourned. But—having consecrated these passable forms with our gratitude—we must allow our mourning to pull us forward, elsewhere, on toward the unknown. We as Christians are called to have faith that while our wanderings will bring risk and danger, we might also find grace in being altered by what comes, in listening with attention to the incomprehensible words of the strangest stranger as perhaps the word we have been listening for.

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I have a new essay up at @ChristianCent. It’s on the rightwing (and mainline) anxiety over the decline of the “Christian West,” and a theological argument for why we should actually embrace its impermanence. https://t.co/3z9McQxyws

— mac loftin (@mac_lof) September 13, 2023

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Anglican Diocese of #SouthCarolina Moving to Purchase Land for Camp and Retreat Center https://t.co/DldUEvojnd #faith #parishministry #anglican #religion #retreatcenters #realestate [Diocesan picture] pic.twitter.com/9KTEUErDPO

— Kendall Harmon (@KendallHarmon6) September 15, 2023

Inflation, interest rates, and GDP growth might be valuable historical economic statistics, but they don’t capture the voice of the American consumer in real time. This was the motivation for the Suffolk University Sawyer Business School/USA TODAY national survey of adults on kitchen table issues.

We opened the survey by asking respondents to summarize in a word the state of the economy today. A total of 22% used words like “excellent,” “good,” “growing,” “improving,” “getting better,” “fair,” “average,” and “fine.” That’s more than 1 in 5 feeling pretty good about the economy.

However, nearly 3 in 4 (72%) used words like “horrible,” “terrible,” awful,” “bad,” “poor,” “weak,” “sad,” “dismal,” “crashing,” “struggling,” “disastrous,” “shambles,” “chaotic,” “messy,” “confusing,” “unequal,” “expensive,” “inflation,” “unstable,” “volatile,” “unpredictable,” “anxiety,” “worried,” and “scary.” Those are their words, not ours, and they come from a wide range of demographics, including people at all income levels.

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From food costs to holiday spending: Americans say they're being pummeled by the economy in dire new poll https://t.co/kEAhkK2YCy via @Yahoo

— Marlene T. Diaz (@academicknight) September 15, 2023