 So I've been talking a lot about climate change as it relates to the way climate change has been directly affecting me as someone who lives in the Pacific Northwest. In 2020, I talked about the air quality that was affected and deemed hazardous due to the wildfires. We just had a record-breaking heatwave. So there's a lot, and for me more so than ever, climate change really, I see it in a new light because it's no longer something that's off in the distance. It's affecting us right now, but for me to say that is relatively privileged because where I'm at, even though I'm only now really starting to see the more extreme elements of climate change, climate change has been affecting many poor countries. It's been a catastrophic for a very long time before we thought that it could be catastrophic, right? So this is from Samuel Hooke and Mark Hertzgaard of Common Dreams. They report climate coverage must stop ignoring the world's poorest. The global poor have been living and dying from climate-driven disasters for years, but the mainstream media in richer nations is nowhere to be found. This is really important because I think that part of cutting through the propaganda that we see disseminated from Fox News and Newsmax and the right more broadly speaking is actually showing them the effects of climate change. And around the globe, climate change is having a substantial impact on these poorer countries. And so we need to showcase this. The mainstream media has to focus on this. Otherwise, we can still keep thinking that, oh, well, it's not coming into later or it's a hoax. And thankfully, it seems like most Republicans have moved on from climate change isn't real. Now they're arguing that it's real, but it's not anthropogenic. You know, either way, it's important that we see this, what's happening. So climate change amounts to an undeclared deeply unjust war against the global poor, though they have emitted almost none of the heat-trapping gases that have raised global temperatures to their highest levels in civilization's history. It is the poor, especially in low-income countries in Asia, Africa, and South America who suffer first and foremost from overheating the planet. For more than a decade, perilous climate-driven events in wealthier nations have been preceded by counterparts in the global south. The deadly heat that has brutalized the American West and rightly attracted headline news coverage these past weeks. That kind of heat has been killing and immiserating people across the Sahil in Africa for many years. For example, in Burkina Faso, where as one local journalist lamented with tears in his eyes, the suffering was especially heartbreaking among the old. The old people in his village, the sea level rise that is increasingly inundating Venice despite the six billion spent on elaborate sea barriers meant to protect the city's treasures. Rising seas have been slashing rice yields in Bangladesh for a decade as salty ocean water intrudes farther and further inland onto the soil of the tabletop flat delta of the Ganges and Brahmaputra rivers. So people don't even know that this is happening and this is absolutely an indictment of the American mainstream media who doesn't even talk about climate change nearly enough. But when they talk about it, they don't talk about the way it's having an impact on these developing mostly lower-income countries. Recent scholarly studies and social media posts have suggested that this summer's unprecedented heat and unfolding viruses and might finally help more Americans acknowledge the realities of climate change. Perhaps now, the thinking goes, more of them will realize that climate change is not only real and dangerous, it's happening right now to them or people just like them. But those realities have been clear for some time. The global poor have been living and dying from such climate-driven disasters for years and with much less attention from the world media. A glaring example came last week when virtually every news outlet in the global north ignored a landmark meeting where leaders of low-income countries articulated their positions prior to the Maker Break United Nations COP26 climate summit in November. This V-20 meeting, so named for the 20 countries that founded the Climate Vulnerable Forum in 2009, was hosted by Bangladesh in its capital city, Dhaka on July 8th. Now let me just pause for a moment. Does anyone even know that this meeting took place? In the chat, let me know if you've heard about this. Because I don't think anyone knew that this was taking place. This wasn't covered on a single news outlet to my knowledge. I don't think Americans knew about this, but this is incredible. Yeah, Cassian says nope. Spike says nope. Winston says nope. I didn't hear about this. I think a lot of leftists probably didn't know about this. This is really important. You have vulnerable countries coming together to formulate an agenda for the upcoming climate summit in November and crickets from the mainstream media. Crickets. Yeah, Arthur says no idea and I follow this kind of thing a lot. Same here. The fact that we don't even know about this, this is a failure of the mainstream media. Heads of government or finance ministers from 48 countries that are exceptionally vulnerable to climate change and inhabited by a combined 2 billion people attended the Dhaka summit in person or online. So did John Kerry, U.S. President, Joe Biden's international climate envoy, Antonio Gutierrez, the U.N. Secretary General, David Malpass, the president of the World Bank Group, and the heads of development banks in Asia and Africa. The world media was nowhere to be seen. Now we're going to stop here because I think that it really paints a clear picture that we're ignoring the world's poorest who are suffering right now from climate change. But I do want to actually talk about the results of their meeting. World's poorest nations to the wealthiest. No more excuses on urgent climate action. Now I'm going to scroll down a little bit and basically they came up with what they want to see. So looking through a lens of fair shares accounting, which takes into consideration countries historical responsibility for the planetary emergency. The U.S. must commit to reducing emissions by 195 percent below 2005 levels by 2030 by the same assessment. Canada must slash emissions by 140 percent below 2005 levels by 2030. Richer nations are also urged to submit updated nationally determined contributions and D.C.'s referring to pledges to reduce greenhouse gas emissions that reflect scaled up climate ambition, summarizing the other four parts the document states. Adaptation. This is really important because oftentimes when we talk about climate change, we talk about it in the context of how do we mitigate climate change. But we also have to acknowledge the reality that climate change is here right now. And if we don't also equip ourselves with the capability to adapt, then we're not going to be in a good position. So adaptation with climate impacts increasing provisions to help the most vulnerable adapt, including through increased financial support need to be strengthened. And that's exactly it. This is really important because these first world countries, the U.S. Canada, we're the biggest polluters and low income countries have to suffer the consequences of our emissions. And they don't have the financial wherewithal to do what we can do. So I think it is absolutely necessary that we fund adaptation and help these countries as much as we possibly can. Loss and damage. The consequences of the developed world's historical failure to cut their emissions adequately are already resulting in losses and damage for the most vulnerable. Responsibilities have to be acknowledged and promised measures delivered. Finance. The promise is made in Copenhagen in 2009 and again in the Paris Agreement are unequivocal and must be delivered at least 100 billion per year by 2020 up to 2024. With the concrete delivery plan with at least half going to adaptation with increased annual sums from 2025, the debt consequences of COVID-19 mean that action outside the UN climate process is also essential. Implementation after several summits of stalling governments must by COP26 finalize rules on transparency, carbon trading and common time frames for accelerating action in a way that safeguards development and nature. And according to Lorena Lagarde of the Climate Vulnerable Forum, Ambassador for Parliaments and current Philippine Deputy Speaker, the emergency setting we're in requires bold measures, real leadership, which this report shows with great clarity. Inaction is simply not an option, she said. Yeah, half adaptation is great. There's one tweet that I do want to show you that Nina Turner shared where she made the really important point that climate change is already here. And she shared a video that's so startling. So she says, stop asking how we're going to pay for it and start asking how we can afford not to. And that's really it. I'm so sick and tired of hearing this conversation about how the deficit, how are we going to fund all of this? You want trillions of dollars for renewable technology when solar hydro? Understand that if we don't take action, the cost is going to be so much higher. And this is from the Working Families Party, who she's quote tweeting, the climate crisis is already here. Look at this. Oh my God! So we have this. We have record breaking heat waves in the Pacific Northwest, where it was a mass death casualty event actually. There were people in old homes who didn't actually have the cognitive capacity to dial 911. They died. They died. I believe the death count is 83. That was the last time I checked. I want to say it probably has increased since then. But older people are the most vulnerable. And in older homes, they didn't have contact with others. They didn't have air conditioning. A lot of them died. It's just that's not even taken into account the folks who had medical issues due to the extreme heat. You know, heat stroke. It killed a lot of plants here. It basically cooked my mom's plants. It's here. And that's what I really think we have to emphasize. You know, because conservatives can claim that we're being alarmist when we're like chicken little. We're screaming that the sky is falling. The sky is falling. But it's beyond that point. Now it's not just some distant thing happening in developing countries. It's here right now. The sky has already fallen. It's here. Climate change is here. And it's already killing American citizens. So the question is, what are we going to do to stop further damage and adapt to the damage that is inevitable? We don't know that there's anything we can do at this point. Perhaps there's like a runaway greenhouse effect where even if we cut our CO2 emissions to zero, perhaps that still is going to not make that much of a difference. What we have to really, I think, focus on is trying to pull CO2 out of the atmosphere. It's just the situation is absolutely, it's grim. But if we're going to go down as a species, I want to know that we go down fighting.