“Our Planet, Our Future, An Urgent Call for Action” is the title of the 2021 Nobel Prize Summit. As a follow up to that summit, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine recently published Our Planet, Our Future: An Urgent Call for Action d/d April 29th 2021.
The opening paragraph of the Noble Laureate declaration implicitly calls for immediate unified worldwide action:
The first Nobel Prize Summit comes amid a global pandemic, amid a crisis of inequality, amid an ecological crisis, amid a climate crisis, and amid an information crisis. These supranational crises are interlinked and threaten the enormous gains we have made in human progress.
The context and content of that prestigious summit is well worth analysis and contemplation. The Nobel Laureates identified looming risks to “the enormous gains we have made in human progress.” In other words, the Nobel Laureates foresee a distinct possibility that human progress may be on a path of diminishment if the world does not join together to take care of and fix the biosphere, our planet Earth. In that regard, President Biden’s infrastructure plan is merely a big blip.
The Nobel Laureates clarion call implicitly exposes neoliberalism’s driving force of globalization as a core issue that impacts the planet by reaping riches without any hesitation or concern for the disintegration of ecosystems. Not one ecosystem is left unscathed, not even one, as the planet huffs and puffs and exudes gas under the most severe stress in millions of years, “unprecedented” has become the most favored word in scientific jargon.
Although not mentioned by the Nobel Laureates, one of the biggest challenges to their concerns is a burgeoning worldwide right-wing anti-science populist movement, which may be the Achilles heel to any and all agreements amongst major nations to fix the planet. In such case, there’s a distinct possibility that the world’s right-wing populist crusade may take civilization down a rabbit hole, sans a return ticket.
Trump-style leadership is found throughout the world, and it’s not going away any time soon. Quite the opposite as it’s the most extreme anti-intellectual, anti-establishment, anti-science faction in modern history. Trump’s anti-science stance chased top-flight scientists out of the country, several fled to France. In the first two years of the Trump administration, more than 1,600 federal scientists left government according to Office of Personnel Management employment data analyzed by the Washington Post. Similar articles in other publications describe nearly total decimation of key science personnel and loss of access to crucial scientific information that will take years and years to replenish. Trump tossed science out the window and crushed access to crucial data that’s needed to meet the very goals required to repair the planet, as suggested by the Nobel Laureates.
Moreover, anti-intellectual right-wing populists are not finished. They’ve only just begun. “Across Europe, right-wing parties have become not just increasingly authoritarian and anti-democratic but anti-fact, anti-expert, anti-reason.”
The Nobel Laureates didn’t mention, and likely would never mention, the biggest obstacle to their plans, which is the growing powerful right-wing anti-science populist crusade. America’s Congress is filled with them: “Rejection of mainstream science and medicine has become a key feature of the political right in the U.S. and increasingly around the world.
It’s likely that the Nobel Laureate proposals (see link at end of this article) don’t have a snowball’s chance in hell as long as major countries are poisoned by lowly ignorance and make-believe lies, thus exposing a universal failure to provide the basics of education, thereby spewing out reams of anti-science nitwits. In the end, it spells trouble for a very troubled planet. Failure of education is fatal!
Alas, history does repeat:
The destructive potential of anti-science was fully realized in the U.S.S.R. under Joseph Stalin. Millions of Russian peasants died from starvation and famine during the 1930s and 1940s because Stalin embraced the pseudoscientific views of Trofim Lysenko that promoted catastrophic wheat and other harvest failures.
In similar fashion, repeating Stalin-type lunacy but 80 years later:
The Trump White House launched a coordinated disinformation campaign that dismissed the severity of the epidemic in the United States, attributed COVID deaths to other causes, claimed hospital admissions were due to a catch-up in elective surgeries, and asserted that ultimately that the epidemic would spontaneously evaporate. It also promoted hydroxychloroquine as a spectacular cure, while downplaying the importance of masks. Other authoritarian or populist regimes in Brazil, Mexico, Nicaragua, Philippines and Tanzania adopted some or all of these elements.
Currently, three nationwide surveys show white Republicans, including one-in-four Republican House members, refusing COCID-19 vaccines. This obstructionist behavior originated with protests against vaccines as a major platform of the Tea Party with its “health freedom” rallies when a measles epidemic hit parts of California. The same health freedom rallying cry then spread to Texas. Nowadays, Public refusal of COVID-19 vaccines extends to India, Brazil, South Africa, and several lower income countries and in parts of Europe, providing first-hand real-time evidence that ignorance spawns avoidable deaths.
Right-wing populism and the practice of science naturally clash. Studies show that science is (a) evidence-based (b) objective and (c) demands proof of statements, whereas populist politics is based on emotional, easily falsifiable annunciations, but the truth destroys their agenda. Therefore, truth must be avoided at all costs. “If you tell a big enough lie and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.” (Joseph Goebbels)
The Nobel Laureates offer guideposts for the initial stages of saving the planet: (1) the next decade is crucial (2) global emissions must be cut in half (3) destruction of nature must stop. They “get it” in terms of what ails the world, and their declaration is remarkably similar to statements made by a few bold outspoken scientists over the past couple of decades. In fact the Nobel Laureates endorse warnings found throughout peer-reviewed literature over the past couple decades that unfortunately never found loud enough voices to make a difference.
Thus, the Nobel Laureates “Urgent Call for Action,” has exposed serious threats to the planet already recognized over the past several years, as stated: “Societies risk large-scale, irreversible changes to Earth’s biosphere and our lives as part of it.”
That warning has been repeated, but largely ignored, over and over again over the past several years but voiced by too few scientists, until recently, things are changing so fast that they’re coming out of the woodwork with warnings of the loss of ecosystems, meaning loss of habitat, loss of vertebrates, loss of the Great Barrier Reef, loss of the Arctic, loss of flying insects in ‘protected’ European nature reserves, loss of arthropods in tropical rainforests in Puerto Rico and Western Mexico, loss of rainforest throughout the world, and irreversible Antarctica disintegration, as the world’s Nobel Laureates finally plead for “An Urgent Call for Action.”
Throughout years of concern by scientists of loss of the planet’s remarkable capabilities, nature has never really had a chance. It simply can’t avoid the impact of the Anthropocene Era humongous wayward human footprint that arbitrarily crunches and munches everything in site. Nature is an easy target.
In the final analysis, saving the planet may be beyond the clarion call by Nobel Laureates simply because the challenges of accomplishment may be bigger than the final solution: “One would be hard-pressed to find a region of the world that populism didn’t touch in the 2010s. The decade brought us the election of Donald Trump in the United States and the Brexit vote in Britain. It witnessed the rise of the Alternative for Germany—the first far-right party to enter the country’s national parliament in decades—as well as the ascent of populist parties in countries such as Austria, Brazil, Italy, India, Indonesia, and Poland. By 2018, as many as 20 world leaders held executive office around the world.”
The aforementioned article identifies the next big target of right-wing populists, as follows: “Whereas much of the past decade revolved around arguments over issues of immigration and sovereignty, the 2020s could be dominated by a new, more pressing narrative: climate change.”
Indigenous protest, Brazil April 2018. “By painting the streets red, we’re showing how much blood has already been shed in the struggle to protect indigenous territories” – Sônia Guajajara, a spokeswoman for APIB (Brazilian indigenous organization). © Marcelo Camargo/Agência Brasil
The land rights of the Xokleng, a tribe that was violently expelled from its territory in the 19th and 20th centuries to make way for European colonists, are now the focus of a landmark court case in Brazil.
The Xokleng were brutally persecuted and evicted by armed militias to make way for European settlers. The Supreme Court hearing into the so-called “Time Limit Trick” could now set the effects of these and subsequent evictions in stone, establishing a precedent which would have far-reaching consequences for indigenous peoples in Brazil.
Other Xokleng communities are also fighting to recover some of their territory. The Konglui Xokleng in Rio Grande do Sul state have launched a ‘retomada’ (reoccupation) of their land, which is now occupied by a national park. The government wants to make it an ‘ecotourism’ destination. © Iami Gerbase/Survival
The case centers around the demarcation of the “Ibirama La Klãnõ” Indigenous Territory in the state of Santa Catarina in southern Brazil. If they win, the Xokleng would be able to return to a significant part of their ancestral territory.
However, the official demarcation of the territory has been suspended following a lawsuit filed by non-indigenous residents and a logging company operating in the area. They argue that on October 5, 1988 – the date the Brazilian Constitution was signed – the Xokleng only lived in limited parts of the territory and therefore have no right to most of their original land. If this argument succeeds, it would legitimize centuries of evictions experienced by indigenous peoples throughout Brazil.
The Brazilian government encouraged Europeans to settle on indigenous land, and allocated them large parts of the Xokleng and other indigenous territories at the beginning of the 20th century. It also financed a so-called “Indian-hunting militia”, which accelerated the colonial land grab. This militia specialized in the extermination of indigenous peoples and hunted down the Xokleng.
“The Redskins are interfering with colonization: this interference must be eliminated, and as quickly and thoroughly as possible,” German colonists demanded at the time.
German settlers resented Xokleng attempts to defend their territories, and frequently subjected them to cruel “punitive expeditions.”
The Xokleng territory was continuously reduced over several decades. In the 1970s, a dam was built in the small part that remained.
Map of the current (Ibirama) and planned (Ibirama La Klãnõ) indigenous territory. The expansion of the territory is the cause of the legal dispute. © Marian Ruth Heineberg/Natalia Hanazaki based on data from FUNAI/IBGE/MMA.
If Brazil’s Supreme Court votes in favor of the “Time Limit Trick”, it would have devastating consequences for many other indigenous peoples, and their chances of reclaiming their ancestral territories. It could enable the theft of land that is rightfully owned by hundreds of thousands of tribal and indigenous people. The validity of existing indigenous territories could then also come into question.
Brasílio Priprá, a prominent Xokleng leader, said: “If we didn’t live in a certain part of the territory in 1988, it doesn’t mean it was “no man’s land” or that we didn’t want to be there. The “Time Limit Trick” reinforces the historical violence that continues to leave its mark today.”
Indigenous organizations and their allies, including Survival, began raising fears about the “Time Limit Trick” in 2017, calling it unlawful because it violates the current Brazilian Constitution and international law, which clearly states that indigenous peoples have the right to their ancestral lands.
President Bolsonaro is turning back the clock on indigenous rights, attempting to: erase their right to self-determination; sell off their territories to logging and mining companies; and ‘assimilate’ them against their will. Survival International and tribal peoples are fighting side by side to stop Brazil’s genocide.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy has paid tribute to the victims of World War II in a visit to the village of Milove along the Russian border, where tensions had escalated during a recent Russian military buildup.
Zelenskiy laid flowers at a memorial in the village, the president’s press service said.
Since 2015, Ukraine marks May 8 as a Day of Remembrance and Reconciliation for those who lost their lives during World War II. It marks Victory Day on May 9.
Milove is located in the Luhansk region in eastern Ukraine, much of which has been under the control of Russia-backed separatists since 2014. The separatists also hold a large part of the adjacent Donetsk region.
“Ukrainians fought together with dozens of peoples against Nazism…and definitely not for war to take the lives of our people 76 years later,” Zelenskiy said during the visit.
Tensions heightened between Moscow and Kyiv in recent weeks, when Russia moved troops along its border with Ukraine and in the Black Sea Ukrainian region of Crimea, which Moscow illegally annexed in 2014.
Kyiv said the buildup included paratroopers, electronic warfare systems, ballistic missiles, and other potentially offensive capabilities.
The Russian military claimed on April 29 that almost all its troops had now returned to their permanent bases after participating in massive drills.
Russia has provided military, economic, and political support to the separatists in Luhansk and Donetsk in eastern Ukraine. Despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, Moscow maintains it is not involved in Ukraine’s domestic affairs.
More than 13,000 people have been killed during seven years of fighting between the separatists and Ukrainian forces.
Ralph welcomes journalist, Alec MacGillis, author of “Fulfillment: Winning and Losing in One-Click America” about how Amazon continues to suck the life out of Main Street and what can be done about it. And the director of Public Citizen’s Health Research Group, Dr. Michael Carome, gives us the latest on our approach to the Covid pandemic. Plus, we answer a listener about how to avoid flying on Boeing’s 737 Max.
A video of medicines and vials of injections floating in Punjab’s Bhakra canal is doing the rounds on social media. BJP spokesperson Sambit Patra tweeted the video and rebuked the Punjab government by saying, “Respected CM Punjab, This is abhorring & Criminal While patients struggle for essential medicines in Punjab ..thousands of vials of Injection Remdesivir are found dumped in the Bhakra canal! Who’s responsible for this criminal act? Why’s the Punjab Govt silent?”. At the time of writing this article, Patra’s tweet garnered close to 1,300 retweets.
Respected CM Punjab,
This is abhorring & Criminal
While patients struggle for essential medicines in Punjab ..thousands of vials of Injection Remdesivir are found dumped in the Bhakra canal!
Who’s responsible for this criminal act?
Why’s the Punjab Govt silent? pic.twitter.com/wTySio3Zp3— Sambit Patra (@sambitswaraj) May 8, 2021
BJP Punjab and BJP Rajasthan also criticised the Punjab government while sharing the video and a screenshot of two reports – one on the Rajasthan government supplying 10,000 doses of Remdesivir injection to Punjab and the other on Remdesivir vials recovered from Bhakra canal.
One Ravikant Pandey also shared the video on the Facebook Group Pushpendra Kulshrestha. The user claimed that the vials were thrown as a conspiracy against the central government.
The text shared along with the video reads, “ये होता है षड्यंत्र , चीन पापिस्तान के टुकड़ों पर पलनें वालें नेताओं + फर्जी किसान आंदोलन करनें वालों नें रातों रात साजिश करकें लाखों करोड़ो रू में खरीदकर रेमडीसीवर दवाई मरीजों तक ना पहुंचाकर पंजाब की नहरों मे बहा दी , जिस से मरीज की अकाल मृत्यु हो और सरकार की बदनामी हो”.
The video is also circulating with the same text on WhatsApp.
Alt News found that the video is indeed from the Bhakra canal in Punjab but Drug Control Officer said that the vials were fake. The Tribune reported on May 6, 2021 that as many as 621 fake Remdesivir vials were found dumped in the Bhakra canal. Along with Remdesivir, hundreds of Cefoperazone injection vials were seized by the police team led by the Chamkaur Sahib DSP. They were accompanied by health officials.
“In all, 621 Remdesivir and 1,456 Cefoperazone vials were seized from the two spots. In addition, 849 unlabelled vials were recovered. Drug Control Officer Tejinder Singh said prima facie the medicines were fake. The labels on vials did not match with those of original vials of the same company,” reported The Tribune.
Alt News contacted Ropar SSP Akhil Chaudhury who informed, “On the basis of the recovery, an investigation has been initiated. An FIR has been registered. We are examining all the aspects of the case. We have the leads but there hasn’t been a breakthrough yet. A team led by an SP-rank officer is investigating the matter.”
When asked if the Remdesivir vials were fake he said, “As per the Drug Control Officer, the labels of the recovered vials do not match with the original vials from the company, hence it apparently looks fake.”
On April 26, Delhi police DCP Crime Monika Bhardwaj had tweeted images pointing out the difference between the label of fake Remdesivir vials with the real one.
Attention!!
Lookout for these details before buying Remdesivir from the market. pic.twitter.com/A2a3qx5GcA— Monika Bhardwaj (@manabhardwaj) April 26, 2021
We also noticed a few discrepancies in the vials recovered from Bhakra canal – ‘Rx’ before Remdesivir is missing, lack of alignment in the text inscribed on the label and the ‘v’ in ‘Vial’ is not capitalized.
An image of the label of a genuine Remdesivir vial manufactured by Hyderabad-based Hetero company has been posted below. 
It is also noteworthy that the News18 article that BJP Rajasthan shared has now been updated to reflect that the vials recovered were duplicates. The title of the initial report said, “Punjab: Thousands of Remdesivir injections found floating in canal, the box said ‘for government supply, not for sale’.” The updated headline says, “Punjab: Remdesivir injections recovered floating in canal, probe finds they were fake, police registers case”.
Alt News has reached out to the drug manufacturer for comment on the label of the vials. We will update the report if and when they respond. At present, the Drug Control Officer has stated that the vials were fake. The packaging of the vials recovered from the Bhakra canal matches the packaging of fake vials.
