Nitrous oxide, a third greenhouse gas nearly 300 times more potent than carbon dioxide, stays in the atmosphere for an average of 114 years, according to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).
...
... nitrous oxide emissions are 12 times higher than previously thought and therefore more of a threat.

The group used a small plane with a probe on its nose to measure greenhouse gases over 120sqm of thawing permafrost in the North Slope of Alaska.

They found that nitrous oxide emissions reached what was previously thought to be the expected yearly limit within just one month in August 2013. [Source]

The "research paper is prepared by and is the property of Bridgewater Associates, LP." It's worth the read. Here are highlights, as I see them:

When we expand the margin analysis globally, we see that many of the forces that supported US profit margins over the past two decades have similarly buoyed profit margins across most other developed economies. Corporations around the world simultaneously benefited from the broad-based decline in labor’s bargaining power, increased globalization, lower anti-trust enforcement, technology allowing for greater scale and lower marginal costs, and lower corporate taxes, interest rates, and tariffs. These factors have produced the most pro-corporate environment in history globally, with the US [corporations, executives, shareholders, not workers] benefiting the most. ...
...
The biggest force behind the global profit margin expansion has been the decline in the labor share of output. A key factor that has contributed to this reduction in labor’s bargaining power versus capital is the decline of organized labor and unions. This phenomenon has occurred over decades for an array of reasons that are intertwined with the other forces acting on margins—like access to pools of cheaper foreign labor and advancing automation technology.
...
A big force driving this phenomenon was the massive pool of cheap labor coming online in China, which depressed labor wages across the developed world ....
...
... this accelerated after 2001, when China joined the WTO ....
... While some of this was passed on to consumers through lower prices for goods, a big portion was retained by these companies in the form of higher profit margins. ...
...
We have seen popular sentiment begin to sour against the forces that have driven margin expansion, as well as against the companies that have benefited most from them. ... we are in the midst of a populist backlash against rising inequality and we are increasingly seeing a move toward more protectionism. Recent surveys show increasing animosity toward globalization and the power of companies more broadly, and a bit more welcoming attitudes toward government regulation of firms.
...
... it will be hard for companies around the world to maintain the current level of profitability over the coming decade, let alone increase margins further from here. [Source]

The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 was primarily about saving corporations billions, but, of course, Donald Trump and the G.O.P couldn’t sell the legislation on the slogan “Google needs more money.“ Instead, they claimed that the bill was really about the middle class, whose lives (and bank accounts) would inevitably be improved when these magnanimous companies shared the wealth not only with top executives and shareholders, but with average workers. More than a year after the passage of the historically unpopular law, the White House continues to embrace this trickle-down fantasy, declaring in a “fact sheet” released yesterday titled “American Workers Are Thriving Thanks To President Donald J. Trump’s Middle Class Tax Cuts” that the T.C.J.A. has resulted in “big bonuses.” And by big, they mean, on average, a penny.

According to the Economic Policy Institute’s Larry Mishel, data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Employer Costs for Employee Compensation shows that “bonuses actually fell $0.22 between December 2017 and December 2018 and the average bonus for 2018 was just $0.01 higher than in 2017.” ...
...
Anyway, enjoy that penny—don’t spend it all in one place! [Source]

Banks now create most of our money supply and need to be made public utilities, following the stellar precedent of the Bank of North Dakota, which makes below-market loans for local communities and businesses while turning a profit for the state. The Bank of North Dakota was founded in 1919 in response to a farmers’ revolt against out-of-state banks that were foreclosing unfairly on their farms. Since then it has evolved into a $7.4 billion bank that is reported to be even more profitable than JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs, although its mandate is not actually to make a profit but simply to serve the interests of local North Dakota communities. Along with hundreds of public banks worldwide, it has demonstrated what can be done by cutting out private shareholders and middlemen and mobilizing public revenues to serve the public interest.
...
... says Sen. Hasegawa, “I see a public bank as almost inevitable because of the current financial structures we’re required to live under.” State infrastructure needs are huge, and the existing funding options—raising taxes, cutting services and increasing debt levels—have been exhausted. Newly-created credit directed into local communities by publicly-owned banks can provide the additional funding that local governments critically need.

Whichever state wins the race for the next state bank, the implications are huge. A century after the very successful Bank of North Dakota proved the model, the time has finally come to apply it across the country. [Source]

So true:

“We must not waste any more time in fundamentally changing the way we interact with nature,” he said. “We need an economy that nurtures and restores our environment, not one that trashes it.” [Source]

Sourcewatch writes of ILSI that: “The interests of food, pharmaceutical, tobacco, energy, and other industries have become even more entwined. They have learned to cooperate (rather than blaming each other for the cancer epidemic) and they now form coalitions to fight health and environmental regulations.
...
The aims of PAN Europe and the Endocrine Society, on the other hand, are: 1) to recognise the reality of ‘low dose effects’ which are currently not tested at all for pesticides; 2) the recognition that chemicals may cause non-linear toxicity responses over a wide range of doses. These are called ‘non-monotonic dose-effect responses’ (whereas regulators presently acknowledge only linear dose-response curves of toxicity and even dismiss effects entirely if they are not linear); 3) mandatory testing for endocrine disruption; 4) to dispute the current regulatory assumption that chemicals have safe thresholds. All are missing from the SAPEA report.

In a further blow to precaution, the SAM report proposes to change EU rules by exchanging the acceptable level of citizen protection from “do not have any harmful effects on humans” for an undefined level, that of “acceptable risk”. This is the change of regulation that would make human harm legal, since it would stop the EU’s much-detested-by-industry ‘hazard approach’ that aims to avoid any exposure of humans to classified (mutagenic, carcinogenic, reprotoxic (toxic for reproduction), persistent and endocrine disrupting) pesticides. [Source]

Agreed:

... cities with millions of inhabitants rendered uninhabitable by heat, widespread flooding of coastal regions (in which hundreds of millions of people live), catastrophically long droughts, water shortages, crop failures, gigantic forest and brush fires and, as a result, untold millions of climate refugees. It will happen at all once, and it will only get worse and worse. If we're very unlucky, one day we may not have clouds.
...
... The young have started fighting back.

And they shouldn't stop. [Source]

There is anthropogenic global warming driving massive climate change bringing more and more catastrophic weather events and causing climate refugees, huge economic losses, and unprecedented political divides. What's to do? Well, many people believe it's worth it to break small laws to draw attention to the aforementioned disasters in the making, disasters that can and ought to be avoided via proper vision and will to bring forth the right planning, organizing, and exercising of such. Those people have started their "Extinction Rebellion." It's growing. Will it help save the day?

Extinction Rebellion: the green movement with global ambitions

What if we actually pulled off a Green New Deal? What would the future look like? The Intercept presents a film narrated by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and illustrated by Molly Crabapple. Set a couple of decades from now, the film is a flat-out rejection of the idea that a dystopian future is a forgone conclusion. Instead, it offers a thought experiment: What if we decided not to drive off the climate cliff? What if we chose to radically change course and save both our habitat and ourselves? We realized that the biggest obstacle to the kind of transformative change the Green New Deal envisions is overcoming the skepticism that humanity could ever pull off something at this scale and speed. That’s the message we’ve been hearing from the “serious” center for four months straight: that it’s too big, too ambitious, that our Twitter-addled brains are incapable of it, and that we are destined to just watch walruses fall to their deaths on Netflix until it’s too late. This film flips the script. It’s about how, in the nick of time, a critical mass of humanity in the largest economy on earth came to believe that we were actually worth saving. Because, as Ocasio-Cortez says in the film, our future has not been written yet and “we can be whatever we have the courage to see.”