Friday, December 1, 2023
Hi everyone,
Here’s the agenda today: UP FIRST: A tentative breakthrough at COP28
CATCH UP: The mystery of meaning in psychedelic experiences — Dylan Scott, senior correspondent |
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The world agrees to a climate change damage fund |
Dominika Zarzycka/NurPhoto via Getty Images |
For years, developing countries have been pressuring the world’s wealthiest nations to help pay for the damage caused by climate change. While a changing climate affects everyone, developing nations have often been hit harder than the rich countries whose environmental failures have had an outsized role in creating our climate crisis. On Thursday, the first day of COP28, the two sides finally reached an agreement.
It’s been called a “loss-and-damage” fund. The finer details still need to be worked out before the end of the summit on December 12, but the participating countries have agreed to create the fund and on its basic structure. It is a long-sought breakthrough: Developing countries began to advocate for such a program in the early 1990s, but they have met resistance from the wealthy countries (including the US) who worried any tacit acknowledgment of their role in the changing climate could open the door to more legal liability. (For that reason, the tentative plan is to call it the Climate Impact and Response Fund, which is more neutral.)
A report released last year by the Vulnerable Twenty Group (V20), a collection of countries most at risk from climate change, attempted to calculate the economic costs of climate change for 55 of the world’s countries most vulnerable to its effects. The researchers concluded that these countries had on average lost 20 percent of their potential wealth over two decades because of climate change’s costs. Some African countries are now spending more than 15 percent of their GDP to shore up climate change vulnerabilities, even though the continent as a whole is contributing less than 4 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions.
The accumulated economic losses in these climate-vulnerable countries have grown to more than $500 billion since 2000, according to the V20 report. That is the loss and damage that this new fund purports to address. -
Wealthy countries will transfer money to developing countries to ameliorate the costs of climate change. The fund will be housed at the World Bank for the next four years. That has been a point of contention, as the World Bank is closely associated with the United States and the US has been reluctant to agree to a loss-and-damage fund. However, the fund is going to be managed by a board that has more members from developing countries than developed ones, as a check on US influence.
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There is still not enough money being put into the fund. The United Arab Emirates (which is hosting COP28 but got caught planning to use the occasion to sell its oil) is putting $100 million into the fund, as is Germany. The United Kingdom is contributing $60 million and Japan is kicking in $10 million. These totals are still far short of the $100 billion annual goal once deemed necessary for the fund.
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The US has come under criticism for its meager contribution, just $17.5 million. Not only does that amount fall far short of the commitments from other countries, but it is not at all proportional to America’s outsized role in driving the climate crisis. The US bears more responsibility than any other country for the planet’s warming so far and the attendant climate consequences that will last for centuries.
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Important details still need to be worked out. The goal is to have final text before COP28’s conclusion. But there are still bedeviling questions, such as: What are China and Saudi Arabia’s statuses under this agreement? Both are not technically considered developed nations by the United Nations, but they have played and will continue to play an outsized role in the health of the planet’s climate. The participating countries will also have to get buy-in at home, which could end up a serious obstacle in the US, where a Republican-controlled House of Representatives must sign off on America’s promised contribution to the fund, paltry though it may be.
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This is your brain on psychedelics |
As you might have noticed, psychedelics have gone mainstream. Researchers and clinicians continue to test the bounds of psilocybin (the active ingredient in magic mushrooms) and LSD and their potential for helping people find meaning in their lives, overcome trauma, and more.
Evidence continues to accumulate that these psychoactive substances do lead to the people who ingest them having meaningful experiences. Studies have consistently found that the vast majority of people who consume psychedelics in a research setting report having one of the most meaningful experiences of their lives.
But why do these particular compounds elicit such profundity — and how can we best harness their mind-blowing effects? Those are the questions that scientists are still trying to answer, as Vox’s Oshan Jarow wrote today. -
Serotonin receptors start the ignition to psychedelic experiences. Every person’s brain is littered with proteins, called serotonin 2A receptors, that serve as ports for that all-important neurotransmitter that is critical to mood and sensation. As it turns out, LSD acts on those same proteins: One noteworthy study found that when people took a drug that blocks these receptors and LSD at the same time, they did not have a psychedelic experience.
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Psychedelics change what you find important and forge new connections within your brain. There isn’t one part of your brain, or a network within your brain, that we can point to and say, “Here, here is where your perception of your life’s meaning lives.” But we do know of neural networks that serve related functions, such as that of “salience,” your brain’s sense of what is important. Research finds psychedelics act on the salience network.
- The psychedelic experience is about more than brain compounds. The ritual and the setting that precedes partaking can set the tone for a person’s experience and be the difference between a good trip and a bad one. But we also know you can’t trip your way to a meaningful life. These experiences should be a stepping stone to figuring out how to find meaning in our sober lives, not an end to themselves.
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🗣️ “White college voters are the only group where there is significant downside to the GOP for their cultural positions, because they have views of these issues that are more liberal than their partisanship. Meanwhile, nonwhite voters have views to the right of their current partisan breakdown on virtually every issue, suggesting upside for Republicans if they can make the case to these voters on policy. The dynamic here is a trade between white college voters and nonwhites, which might not necessarily net out positively for Republicans every time.”
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— Patrick Ruffini, a leading Republican pollster and political strategist, to Vox’s Christian Paz on the potential for a racial realignment in US politics. [Vox] |
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The final hours of the George Santos circus. George Santos, dogged by accusations of fabrication and fraud since he was elected in 2022, has been expelled from the US House. He spent his final days and hours in office as he had much of the past year: Trying to drum up media interest and launching invectives against his colleagues. [New York Times]
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The world’s largest iceberg is on the move. Meet A-23a, the largest iceberg off the coast of Antarctica. It’s as large as the Hawaiian island of Oahu and now it is unmoored. Scientists say this particular development can’t be linked to climate change — ”they’re just how Antarctica works” in the words of one — but they note other parts of the icy continent are melting as a result of warming temperatures. [NPR]
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Who are the overemployed? I knew the labor market was running hot, but this is ridiculous. Meet one man who was already holding down a job at IBM — before then negotiating new roles at Meta and Tinder, all while keeping his IBM gig. While it’s hard to put a number on it, it seems the ranks of such overachievers are growing. [Business Insider]
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