Posts that I especially recommend for Monday, April 19, 2021

• EU not to renew AstraZeneca, J&J Covid-19 vaccine contracts on expiry from Business Standard. 

• Another day, another dollar | Pfizer defends price for its COVID vaccine from RT's channel on YouTube (3:18m)

• If Johnson & Johnson Coronavirus Vaccine Shots Are Halted Because of Blood Clots, Why Have Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech Shots Not Also Been Halted? by Adam Dick from Ron Paul Institute.
  

• Pathogens in One Lesson, Courtesy of Sunetra Gupta by Jeffrey A. Tucker from American Institute for Economic Research. (Note: This is essentially a book review of Gupta's book entitled Pandemics: Our Fears and the Facts.)

• Gates Unhinged: Dystopian Vision for the Future of Food by Colin Todhunter (a Brit) from Off-Guardian. 

• The truth about doublespeak: Is it lying or just being persuasive? by researchers at the University of Waterloo from Phys Org.
  

• Cold War Liberalism and the Labor Movement: The Epic Fail by Richard Moser from CounterPunch. 

• Wall Street’s Mega Bank CEOs To Be Hauled Before Congress in May; Nobody Will Say Why by Pam & Russ Martens from their weblog Wall Street on Parade. Note: The Martens soon dash hopes that anything substantial will come of the hearings.

If past is prologue, which we pray it is not, the hearings will use such a buckshot approach to questioning the witnesses that there will be no meaningful takeaway to the public from the hearings.

 

Later they go on to argue:

 

While each of these issues are critical to the national debate, dumping them all into one hearing where the Congressional questioner together with the witness get just a combined five minutes does a disservice to the seriousness of each issue. In fact, this approach has served to hold back change on Wall Street as news reporters simply grab the single most titillating detail from each hearing and put that in a headline. 

 

I argue that the purpose of the hearings will be to give the appearance that Congresspeople are protecting the people from the shenanigans of the major financial institutions. The bank CEOs are closer to the ruling capitalist class (if not a part of it) than the Congresspeople who are treated as mere employees of the ruling class. 

• How the US Enforces Exploitative Economic Policies: The IMF and the World Bank by Rod Driver from his weblog Elephants in the Room.

• Biden Approves DAPL! Betrays Native Americans Again featuring Jimmy Dore citing various mainstream reports regarding that the wealthy who contribute far more than the poor and Justin Jackson offering his comments on Dore's YouTube channel (9:08m).
  

• Deliberate Attempts to Downplay the Science: Karl Grossman Interviews Dr. Devra Davis  in a 29 minute YouTube video from Environmental Health Trust.
  

• Western US States Prepare For 1st-Ever Water Shortage Declaration; Hoover Dam Hydroelectric Generation At Risk by Tyler Durden from his weblog ZeroHedge.

• Opium poppy production in Afghanistan from Global Research. (Note: This article is posted on Esri a company that is devoted to "A geographic information system (GIS) is a framework for gathering, managing, and analyzing data." However, because there is no date or an author on this post which originated from Esri, I have decided to post it from Global Research as an exception to my usual policy to post articles from their original websites.
  

Secret U.S. Wars Endanger Africa

Click here to access article by Bernhard from his blog Moon of Alabama. 

Unfortunately, there are few independent reporters who can enlighten us as to what the US Empire is really doing Africa. This German blogger and super-sleuth digs up much material about the US's mysterious actions in Africa. As elsewhere in world, these operations are mostly secret; and if reported on, are loaded with self-serving propaganda issued by the Empire's ruling class that wants to secure from Africa all the riches they have.  

Gold Oil Dollars Russia and China

Click here to access article by F. William Engdahl from New Eastern Outlook. 

I frequently post articles by Engdahl because I think he has a firm, but limited, grip on economic reality. I write "firm, but limited, grip" because he is a gold bug--the term I prefer is "gold fetishist". Apparently the terms apply to China and Russia. It is a fact that many, if not most people, have this fetish about gold, but it is likely the most polluting of mining industries. 

Gold has limited uses outside of gold fillings and replacement teeth (even these are being replaced by ceramics) and computers. It's not even used as money because it is so inconvenient--try buying groceries or gas with it. But countries still like to pollute the environment by digging it up and processing it with the worst polluting chemicals like mercury, and then store it forever in vaults (usually deep underground) to claim that their money is backed by the magic of gold.

Engdahl also doesn't see that the Empire's advanced capitalist system has anything to do with the irrational and suicidal policies that it is currently pursuing. 

The only factor keeping the dollar from total collapse is the US military and Washington’s deployment of deceptive NGOs around the world to facilitate plundering of the world economy.

However to his credit, he explains how this is affecting the policies of Russia, China, and other countries to develop their own economies.

Understanding America’s Many Wars

Click here to access article by Murray Polner from Uncommon Thought Journal. (Edited for much needed clarity at 8:15 PM Seattle time.)

I've spent too much time this morning trying to access information about the author to the detriment of this commentary/essay. Polner is the book editor of History News Network and has written several books and articles featured in many center-liberal publications. The best I could find on his bio is from Book Depository:

Murray Polner has had a rich and varied career as a teacher, college professor, writer and editor. He is the author of When Can I Come Home. His writings have also appeared in the New York Times, Newsday, the Washington Post, Commonweal, The Nation, Village Voice and the Boston Globe. He lives in Great Neck, New York. Murray Polner is an editor and the author of No Victory Parades: The Return of the Vietnam Veteran and has written for The New York Times,The Nation, Commonweal, The Washington Monthly, and many other publications.

I want to use this article/book review which Polner writes about so favorably as an illustration of how a mainstream American intellectual writes about political subjects such as US wars thereby serves as a useful propagandist for the US-led Empire. Now that the Japanese government is a useful ally/puppet of the Empire, we Americans must forgive and forget that we were once adversaries.

In his favorable review of a book by James Bradley’s entitled The China Mirage he uses circumlocutions and abstractions to hide the nature of the rivalries the capitalist nations engaged in during WWII, and as a result he obscures and distorts the realities of these wars. He ends up arguing that our war with Japan was a mistake because "we" (at that time) simply didn't understand Japan's economic needs. In other words, the war was all about national interests and "we" didn't understand Japan's national interests and instead mistakenly aligned our policies with China. Balderdash!

It is Bradley’s contention that Americans have misunderstood and misjudged China, wedded as they were to the fantasy that China was yearning to be Christianized, Westernized and Americanized while ignoring that it had and has its own national interests. This was never more obvious than after 1931, when the Japanese –eager to control China as part of its sphere of interest– invaded Manchuria, which the U.S. promptly denounced as an act of aggression. For both nations the great prize was China. After that, Japan and U.S. were on the road to war.

By referring to the competing capitalist national gang rivalries behind the abstractions of nations (China, Japan, US), he, like many ruling class propagandists, hides the real nature of the devastating wars in the 20th century.

Let me present a concise alternative view of history that focuses more specifically on competition among capitalist ruling classes to control access to markets and resources all over the world to satisfy their interests of profits and power.

In spite of the external military operations of other capitalist countries and internal threats posed by poverty, hunger, chaos, and epidemic diseases, the success of the Soviet revolution in 1917 posed an ongoing threat of a system that directly challenged private ownership of the economy that existed in all the other technologically advanced countries. Should the Soviet experiment succeed, all capitalist ruling classes were threatened by the alternative example of public ownership. Thus capitalist ruling classes, having failed to re-install a capitalist regime in the Soviet Union, waited to see if the new Soviet government simply collapsed under the weight of so many initial threats.

During the 1930s when Western nations were severely plagued by the Great Depression, the Soviet Union was making rapid economic strides and enjoying full employment. Obviously this was of great concern to Western capitalist ruling classes and they began a project to support right-wing fascist parties in Europe which ultimately brought the Nazi Party to power in Germany and the fascists in Italy. Because the "democratic" (the US, Britain, France, etc) nations stood by in neutrality, they allowed Germany and Italy to attach the left elected Spanish government during the Spanish Civil War. Only the Soviet Union and volunteers from the non-fascist Western countries came to the aid of the Spanish government, and the Soviet leaders lost interest in doing so because they themselves felt threatened.

During this period American and other European ruling capitalist classes were split in their attitudes and policies toward the fascist countries. On the one hand, they saw the latter as a bulwark against organized labor unions and leftists, but on the other, especially as the latter grew in power, they feared that they might present a threat to the economic interests of capitalists in what became known as the core allied nations (which initially excluded the Soviet Union). Also the more fascist oriented capitalists in the allied nations saw the splendid potential of the German Nazi government to expand eastward (Hitler had described this plan in Mein Kampf as Lebensraum). 

Similarly Japan's ruling capitalist class had their own imperialist concept of Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. What most Americans are unaware of is that the US ruling class had their own concept, the Grand Area (this area was extended after WWII and became known as the "free world"). The Allies patiently let Germany expand and grow their empire on the European continent and move east toward the Soviet Union. However Germany unexpectedly invaded Poland, with which Britain had a defense treaty, instead of going from Czechoslovakia on to the Soviet Union. Thus began a phony war after which the Nazi government attacked Britain and continued to move east and invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941. Because the Netherlands, Belgium, and France had been easily overrun by German forces, the Allied ruling classes expected that Germany would easily defeat the Soviet forces. But whereas the defeat of the Allied countries was mainly due to their ruling classes being split in their orientation to the fascist nations, the Soviet government was united in their opposition to fascism. As a result the German forces encountered great difficulty after only a month into their invasion. 

Although I cannot yet prove it, I am convinced by much circumstantial evidence that leading US ruling class figures at this time saw that Germany was not going to succeed in conquering the USSR and therefore Germany was now a threat to the British Empire and the US. They and their British associates began formulating plans in the late summer of 1941 to prepare for war with the Axis powers. They saw the necessity of securing what they referred to as the Grand Area, which included the Western Hemisphere plus southeast Asia, in order to win the war against the Axis powers. Of course, this put them on a collision course with Japan's ruling class who vitally needed the resources in that area and oil from the US. The US government soon embargoed oil exports to Japan in order to force Japan along together their ally Germany into a war with the Anglo-American combination.

Capitalist ruling classes are very much like street gangs in that they compete over territories which provide them with opportunities of profit and power. Thus the Anglo-American capitalist combination were not going to permit the capitalist ruling classes in Germany and/or Japan to dominate the world and threaten their access to raw materials and markets. The British capitalists persuaded US capitalists to join them in opposition to the German Reich, and this combination went on to win WWII with the result that they have dominated the world ever since. (Israel was added in 1967 after the nation and the international Zionist Jewry became obvious as a useful addition to the existing Empire.) However, the governments of Russia, China, Iran and other countries are now starting to challenge their dominance, and we can expect more major wars to follow--unless we organize an effective opposition against the profit and power addicted ruling class!

The demise of the great apes. Growth, GDP, capitalism, causes

Click here to access article by Will Denayer from Flassbeck-Economics (based in Germany).

Yes, this rather lengthy article does cover all the topics in the title. It starts off with the rapid decline of the apes and other species, but expands to cover capitalism's insatiable need for growth and how the capitalist ruling classes fool themselves and us with their "green" policies and promises.

Rise in plunder of Earth’s natural resources

Click here to access article by Alex Kirby from Climate News Network. 

Like many of these climate related websites that are funded by wealthy charities featuring writers from corporate media or government media, there is no mention of the 800 pound capitalist gorilla in the room that is driving the plunder of the Earth's natural resources.

Gold’s hidden climate footprint

Click here to access article by Paul Brown from Climate News Network.

The collapse of the Soviet Union left Bulgaria [and adjacent regions] achieving in the 1990s what the rest of the world is working hard to manage in the 2020s, a reduction in its carbon dioxide emissions of more than 45%.

But while a lot of inefficient mines and smelting plants have closed, the rump of the minerals industry survived. It is now expanding again, destroying pristine forests and wildlife and raising questions about Europe’s policy of transporting ore across the globe for smelting and refining.

Vast quantities of raw material are transported by ship, but the emissions caused are not counted because shipping is not covered by the Paris Agreement of last December. 

Spring snow a no-go?

Click here to access article from Unews at the University of Utah.

Red = Average temperatures;  Blue = Co2

Spring snowpack, relied on by ski resorts and water managers throughout the Western United States, may be more vulnerable to a warming climate in coming decades, according to a new University of Utah study.

The study, accepted for publication in Geophysical Research Letters, models the year-to-year variability in precipitation and temperature in Utah’s Wasatch Mountains and other ranges in the West. [The researchers] found that above a threshold elevation, the amount of spring snowpack is dependent more on the amount of precipitation in a year than the temperature. In other words, whether a year is wet matters more than if it’s warm. But below that threshold, temperature matters more. By the end of the century, according to the study, that threshold will move uphill by around 800 feet in the Wasatch and more in the Sierra Nevada, Cascades and parts of the Rocky Mountains. 

 Unfortunately, there is no mention of the fact that positive feedback loops are accelerating global warming.

Extinction, “De-Extinction,” and Capitalism

Click here to access a 52 minute interview with Ashley Dawson, author of a new book entitled Extinction: A Radical History. The interview begins after a news summary at approximately 6:30m. The broadcast is from the studios of KPFA, a listener sponsored radio station in Berkeley, California.

What should we do in the face of the ongoing extinction crisis? What is rewilding, and how does it work? Is de-extinction, which involves the resurrection of extinct species, advisable? Ashley Dawson puts mass extinction and the various efforts to address it in a broader political-economic context.

Dawson targets capitalism as the culprit behind the mass extinction of life forms that is increasing at a rapid rate in spite of various attempts by advocates of  "green capitalism" to preserve species. A very thought provoking interview throughout, but he specifically draws our attention to the destructive role of capitalism starting at 36:25m.

Propaganda as “News”: Ecuador Sells out Indigenous & the Environment to China

Click here to access article by Stansfield Smith from Wrong Kind of Green.

In a world of lies most of which have sources connected with the Empire and serving the Empire's many world interests, this author reports on the participation and collusion of a "human rights" organization and various Empire media corporations to spread disinformation about Ecuador and China, two among the many targets of Empire directors.

Complicating the economic and political situation in Ecuador is that there is a fundamental split between development interests within the country and those who are against further exploitation of the environment via mining and oil developments. Added to this are declining revenues from Ecuador's oil industry which has put a crimp in the government's budget for social services. Although it is likely that this split is being aggravated by Empire sources who want to punish Correa and major corporations who lust after Ecuador's resources, there is a legitimate opposition. This author does not seem to recognize the latter.

Why do we repeatedly see dishonest news articles about President Correa sacrificing the environment and the indigenous to China’s thirst for oil? This has even developed into an anti-Correa campaign by some US NGOs such as Amazon Watch, which is sullying its well-deserved reputation as a leader in the struggle to make Chevron pay for its environmental crimes in Ecuador.

Global warming drains the water of life

Click here to access article by Tim Radford from Climate News Network. 

New research warns that rising temperatures are reducing the mountain snow on which billions of people in lowland areas depend for their water supply.

We have certainly seen the effects of snow pack depletion in the Seattle region. Last year most ski areas were closed for the entire season.

Pope Francis's climate letter is a radical attack on the logic of the market

Click here to access article by Steffen Böhm from Ecologist. 

Strange that I haven't seen this reported in mainstream media. (sarcasm)

What makes Pope Francis and his 183-page encyclical so radical isn't just his call to urgently tackle climate change.

It's the fact he openly and unashamedly goes against the grain of dominant social, economic and environment policies.

Study: Third of Big Groundwater Basins in Distress

Click here to access article from NASA. 

About one third of Earth's largest groundwater basins are being rapidly depleted by human consumption, despite having little accurate data about how much water remains in them, according to two new studies led by the University of California, Irvine (UCI), using data from NASA's Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) satellites.

This means that significant segments of Earth's population are consuming groundwater quickly without knowing when it might run out, the researchers conclude.

What Drought? Oblivious Rich People Whine About Brown Golf Courses, Normal People Drought-Shame Them

Click here to access article by Abby Zimet from Common Dreams.

Despite dramatic new NASA studies finding that the world is running out of water and the historic drought now ravaging California, irritated rich people are having none of this alarmist nonsense, defending their innate right to use obscene amounts of our natural resources because, as one aggrieved woman actually put  it, "What are we supposed to do, just have dirt around our houses?"

It appears that the drought in California is causing some class conflicts. 

War without End in Central Africa

Click here to access article by Keith Harmon Snow from Conscious Being Alliance. 

Snow is an independent, free-lance journalist who spends a lot of time in Africa trying to unravel the mysteries of the chaos spread by many mercenary armies, corrupt government officials, and the hidden hand of Western corporations. I regard Snow's reports among the very few that we have access to by an independent journalist. Otherwise we occasionally get very biased reports from corporate media who, of course, interpret events in Africa to provide cover for Western mining corporations.

However, I have a few criticisms of Snow's reports. First, they are much too infrequent--it seems like he issues them once every two years. Second, when the are issued, they are extremely voluminous going into details of battle scenes, interminable names of small organizations and leaders, and history. One can easily experience fatigue while trying to put all of his information in each article together in order to attain some kind of overall grasp of what is going on there. It would be much better if he could supply more frequently simpler reports focusing on specific subjects or issues with links to other reports to supply readers with more details if they should need it. This likely would require some funding and organization, and I suspect that he functions mostly alone and with very limited resources.

Anyway for my readers, I am supplying what I believe is the major focus of this report by putting together some excerpts from it as follows:

The perpetual aggressors in this long, bloody saga of despair and death served on millions of innocent people in central Africa, Rwanda and Uganda protect the interests and insure the profits of their U.S., Canadian, European and Israeli patrons.  Meanwhile, with a new insurrection afoot in eastern Congo, the western media and its modern day intelligence mercenaries spin disinformation to project black African chaos and whitewash the corruptions of Empire.

"People are killed every day, here and there," says one Congolese human rights investigator in eastern Congo.  "U.S. intelligence agents and the organizations they work with produce disinformation favorable to Rwanda and Uganda.  These guys are on someone's payroll and they have enough money to throw around to their own networks of informants in the Great Lakes region [of Africa]."

BANRO GOLD Corporation runs a mining operation in South Kivu

The U.S. and its allies, primarily Australia, Belgium, Britain, Canada, Germany, Holland and Israel, are all part of the networks of multinational interests plundering the natural resources of the Great Lakes countries.  The corporations involved in eastern Congo are never mentioned, and no pictures are ever shown of their networks of exploitation that exist in parallel and coincidence with the violence.

The corporations operating in eastern Congo protected by the media and western intelligence apparatus, but soaked in Congolese blood, include Banro Gold, Casa Mining, Mwana Africa, Loncor, Anglo-Gold Ashanti, Kilo Gold, Moku Gold, Randgold and Alphamin Resources.

Israeli Dan Gertler -- one of the Congo's greatest current enemies -- has bought up petroleum operations in the lakes regions on the Uganda-Congo frontier.  Gertler's political allies in power in Israel have been making deals with Rwanda.  Another Israeli has been awarded oil-drilling rights in Virunga National Park just in the past two weeks after Canadian oil company SOCOM pulled out under public pressure.

Corporations like Alphamin promise to provide community development programs, with all kinds of publicity of their supposed largesse and generosity. Usually these are cheap exchanges, the equivalent of trinkets for land and minerals, the legacy of colonial occupation and theft.

On 10 June 2015, communities dispossessed of lands and livelihoods by Banro Gold in South Kivu began to confront Banro Gold for the substandard homes provided by Banro. "There is trouble in Luhwindja where Banro is exploiting," reported one Congolese human rights investigator on 10 June 2015. "Banro did nothing to help the locals. The houses they [Banro] built are falling down because people had to abandon them. People are dying from pollution."

The operations of the big mining companies present in eastern Congo are completely whitewashed by the western press and western mercenaries and intelligence front group organizations like the International Crises Group, International Rescue Committee, ENOUGH, Raise Hope For Congo, the U.S. Committee for Refugees and the Social Science Research Council.[63]

The reappearance on the ground in Congo of these Rwandan warlords illuminates the apparatus of impunity involving western governments, non-government front organizations, the United Nations, multinational corporations, think tanks, western academia, the genocide industry, and the industries that profit through the creation of careers and markets for the euphemistically named AID, charity, humanitarian relief, conflict-resolution, and development industries.   None of these latter industries would flourish without the market-based manufacture of suffering, despair, disease and deracination, or the market-based production of internally displaced persons (IDPs) and refugees.

No Climate Protection without Climate Justice; No Climate Justice without Degrowth

Click here to access article by Christiane Kliemann from degrowth (Germany).

And as the German author apparently argues, there can be no "degrowth" without ending the capitalist system and rule by capitalists.

To be able to successfully develop a different type of growth, the countries of the South will require their fair share of the global resources and emissions – which must be much more than the leftovers of the rich North. By consequence the Global North will have to drastically reduce its emissions and resource exploitation. This is, however, impossible within the framework of continuous capitalist economic growth. ....

...we can’t simply rely on technological progress without overhauling the whole economic, social and political environment this progress is embedded in. As many examples in history show, purely technological solutions tend to relocate their negative effects to other sectors, ecosystems or continents, or from the present to the future.

However, I'm not so sure she means this. Maybe like Naomi Klein she thinks that we can simply regulate capitalism better so that we don't have continuous growth.

New age of water wars portends 'bleak future'

Click here to access article by Nafeez Ahmed from Middle East Eye.

Ahmed examines the current and projected effects of climate change in the form of water scarcity, and finds that many areas of the world are already experiencing a crisis.

Although less developed regions are most vulnerable to the impacts of climate-induced water scarcity, richer Western countries and emerging industrial economies are increasingly feeling the heat.  

California drought: agribusiness, fracking untouched by water rationing

Click here to access article by Evan Blake from Ecologist. 

California has responded to the drought by rationing water, with $500 fines for domestic 'water wasters', writes Evan Blake. But agribusiness and water-intensive industries like fracking remain untouched by the restrictions, even though they consume over 90% of the state's water.

OVERdevelopment, OVERpopulation, OVERshoot

Click here to access the introduction to this book by the author William Ryerson, president of Population Media Center and CEO of the Population Institute. Posted on Post Carbon Institute.

Early in the introduction Ryerson writes:

Many of us today do recognize that the Earth and its resources are limited, yet too many people still cling to the notion that modern science and technology will enable us to defy physical limits. In the Middle Ages, alchemists sought in vain for a “philosopher’s stone” that would convert base metals into gold. They never succeeded. Why? Because what they were looking for did not, and could not, exist, because its existence would have violated the physical laws governing the universe.

It's clear that he recognizes that we live on a finite planet, but he still proposes the same solution, direct population control methods, that have been tried for many decades with little in the way of results to show for this type of program. I accuse him of looking toward a solution that defies social laws or realities that govern human societies. I'm referring to the lack of social justice in class structured societies that undermines the health and safety of its citizens. This I firmly believe is a well-guarded secret that social scientists in capitalist societies refuse to acknowledge for reasons that I will shortly explain.

I was first tipped off about this secret fact by a professor who specialized in population studies. I went to her back in the late 1970s because I wanted to take her course which was officially filled up. In one part of our interview she disclosed to me in rather hushed tones that existing population controls methods were missing the point of the reasons for the resistance by the targeted populations: large families were necessary to provide social supports for families that were otherwise missing in class structured societies. It is possible to find such documented evidence to support this argument, but one must look hard and long in population studies to find it. I quote one such source, page five from a book by Mohammed Sharif entitled Poverty Reduction - An Effective Means of Population Control:

There are studies that show that children are not liabilities but assets to poor parents--they contribute to the family's current income and provide old-age security to the parents [he lists eight such studies]. Children, especially male children begin working at age as early as six year and by age 12 they completely pay off to their parents the total cost of their upbringing and in additions enough to cover the cost for one of their siblings [cites one study]. This suggest that larger the number of children, the greater is the net income for the parents and higher is the standard of living.

In the absence of any organized system of social security, during old age parents have to depend on supports from their children. This is especially so because people who live by the day and have no assets other than their physical labor are unable to save for their old age.

Hence it is clear that the only real solution for over-population is a people's revolution to insure that their societies are run "of, by, and for the people". It is for that reason that this secret must be suppressed by capitalist authorities and that capitalist controlled websites such as Post Carbon Institute like to run such articles while ignoring the evidence that these programs don't work.

Here’s Where Ocean Acidification Will Hit the U.S. Hardest

Click here to access article by Brian Kahn from Climate Central.

Living in the Pacific Northwest, I am well aware of the fact that the acidification of the ocean due to the excessive burning of fossil fuels is a huge problem for shellfishery companies. This science oriented website calls attention to the problem; but the implications they draw about corrective actions falls far short of what is required. Are they like the Post Carbon Institute dependent on corporate-connected foundations for their support? The author leaves us with a quote from a researcher calling for more studies and community actions to adapt to this problem. 

“Developing these types of studies that bring the results into a greater community context is extremely valuable to policymakers that need to make decisions for their areas,” Jeremy Mathis, director of ocean and environmental research at Pacific Marine Environmental Lab, said.

“Now is the time to start planning. We don’t want to wait until there is a disruption. These documents provide that incentive for communities to start developing adaptation strategies now that will hopefully provide for them in the future.”

Local communities can create adaptations to a world-wide problem that will save the shellfisheries??!! And to do this "especially if we want scallops, oysters and other shellfish to keep appearing on our dinnerplates"?