The 2025 Annual Meeting of the World Economic Forum is taking place January 20-24 in Davos, Switzerland. As of January 23, 2025, to summarize, of the existential threats; war and climate change, war is number one. Of the two most visible wars in the media, Ukraine received attention and it seems general support while the Mideast received less attention. AI was a strong subject as wealthy companies weighed potential profits and losses. Climate change mitigation's champion, United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres gave yet another powerful plea; this time in the face of Trump's withdrawal from the Paris Agreement and his plan to expand fossil fuel use and a general withdrawal by banks and corporate interests.
On January 23, Michael R. Bloomberg announced that Bloomberg Philanthropies and other US climate funders "will ensure the United States meets its global climate obligations following the federal government’s intent to withdraw from the Paris Agreement for the second time. This includes covering the funding gap left by the United States to UN Climate Change (UNFCCC) and upholding the country’s reporting commitments."
From Politico energy podcast, the term "immediate" - Trump's word - means either effectively or literally withdraw from the Paris Agreement. He can fight international law at COP30 to be held in November in Brazil and throw up roadblocks or just not show up. The US can undermine conversations about the Paris Agreement. The other unknown is whether the US will also pull out of the UNFCCC.
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JANUARY 2025 - From Inside Climate News - A cornerstone of international trade investment is a problem for climate change efforts in developing countries.
Investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS), lets foreign companies bypass national courts and sue governments before international panels of arbitrators where there appears to be a built-in bias.
Most cases are filed by company from wealthy nations, notably the United States, against developing countries who signed on to investment treaties without realizing the degree of impact it had on their economies and self determination. The investor countries usually win in closed door proceedings.
The ISDS system hampers climate change mitigation and adaptation efforts by countries already facing face inequitable circumstances. Additionally, in cases investor countries bypass national laws and polluted the environment. They also have been accused of violating human rights.
Bolivia wants out of the ISDS system. Despite the challenges it faces, including a fragmented justice system, it is taking steps to make this happen and gain independence from what some have called a modern day colonialism.
While more countries, such as South Africa, are fighting back, Bolivia is stuck with the problem until 2035 thanks to a sunset clause.
In Bloomberg, Mexico City hosts busy airport traffic so it was decided to build a new six runway international airport. It would be the best $13 billion can buy. Construction for a new airport on the dry lake bed of Lake Texcoco started and then in 2018 it was stopped. It became one more failed project in the vast Texcoco Basin.
Then audaciously the site was turned into a ecological park.
The city suffers from extreme heat, droughts and pollution. It is also sinking as underground aquifers dry up. Water is increasingly scarce.
The mission was regeneration. Masterful hydraulic engineering was required to bring water back into the basin for people and for wildlife habitat.
The price tag was around $1.7 billion and there was plenty of conflict. The Park opened in July 2023.
With human help or without help, the large public park might survive and adapt into perpetuity.
Maybe adapting to and mitigating climate change is all about balance.
Quote taken from generative AI,"Generative artificial intelligence (AI) is a type of AI that can create new content, such as text, images, music, audio, and videos. It uses machine learning to learn patterns from data and create new content based on prompts... " Using this generative AI, has just tapped more energy and water use, than a google search.
MIT announced a new project in February 2024 that is one resource users can draw on to understand relative costs in terms of energy and water use and where we are headed with the delicate balance as to how AI cuts energy use and how increased demand, including the rapid growth of data centers, pushes us toward the edge in terms of energy and water use in the context of climate change. Writing for MIT news, Anne McGovern interviewed Vijay Gadepally, a senior staff member at MIT's Lincoln Laboratory. He says it is a combination things consumers and researchers can do. It's all about balance. If you use generative AI look around and see what you can do to reduce energy use, maybe consider the load due to your graphics, turn off lights; just be more climate aware. Computing experts, researchers, and designers have a myriad things that can be done to mitigate energy and water use as well. The message is that it takes a collective effort.
The City of Atlanta was clearing signs of homelessness in the vicinity of the Ebenezer Baptist Church in expectation of the crowds that would converge for Martin Luther King Day as well as some money making events happening that weekend.
They didn’t check all of the tents in advance of the hurried sweep. Consequently, Cornelius Taylor was run over by a bulldozer and killed.
He was 49 and homeless in Atlanta Georgia. Cornelius had been asleep in his tent, one of other tents, near the Ebenezer Baptist Church where Martin Luther King Jr had preached from 1960 until he was assassinated in 1968.
In the Guardian, "Sylvia Broome, who does outreach to the unhoused in the area, went to the site on Friday where Taylor was killed and choked up as she described the man to a local outlet as someone with a good heart who enjoyed drawing.“'He had dreams, ambitions, he had family, he was a good, good friend of mine and he’s gone.’” In an interview in the Guardian, Marcus Coleman, a community activist in Atlanta,said that “‘the municipal government times its clearances of homeless encampments with high-profile visitor events. “Big money for the city this weekend,’” he said. “‘The death of Cornelius Taylor and the excruciating manner in which he perished seems unbecoming for a city that’s too busy to hate.’”
The death of Cornelius Taylor has sparked protests around the city.
Let’s hope that the crime of sanitizing MLK’s dream is understood by a city that needs to slow down its development ambitions and rethink its public space.
In Time Magazine - Marlene Engelhorn, a Austrian-German activist and philanthropist, is frequently in the media. She is CO-founder of taxmenow.com, an organization lobbying for higher taxes for the wealthy. She was one of many millionaires attending the World Economic Forum at Davos.
Her view on capitalism was different from most other attendees. She said "...capitalism is unnatural—or human-made. Its power has been blown out of proportion precisely through the obsession, devotion, fixation through which it is regarded. But if we rub our eyes, we can see more clearly. And we see a mess. The planet is burning, drowning, suffocating...Living standards fall continuously, millennials are screwed (never mind the following generations). Meanwhile, the five richest men in the world doubled their wealth from 2020 to 2024."
(To date, Elon Musk's ROI from funding the US election, at around $277 million paid off at around $170 billion during the post-election period, with much much more to come.)
Last year she decided to let strangers decide where 90% ($27 million ) of her inheritance should go. Marlene Engelhorn has given away most of her chemicals-industry inheritance to 77 organizations, including social, climate and left-wing groups.
In a 2024 interview with NBC news she said, “A large part of my inherited wealth, which elevated me to a position of power simply by virtue of my birth, contradicting every democratic principle, has now been redistributed in accordance with democratic values.”
The Engelhorn family's net worth was estimated at $4.2 billion by Forbes. The family's fortune comes from Friedrich Engelhorn, who founded the chemical company BASF.
She is not necessarily alone in her perspective. A survey of more than 2000 millionaires conducted by the Guardian across G20 countries , found that a survey of more than than half of those surveyed believed that wealth concentration was a threat to democracy that leads to a decline in a distrust of the media, the justice system and democracy. The question is how this is defined in practice.
Last year I pledged to give the majority of my wealth back to the society that helped generate it, to do it thoughtfully, to get started soon, and to keep at it until the safe is empty, Mackenzie Scott.
She originally signed on to the Giving Pledge in 2019, which was started by Bill and Melinda Gate. She wrote subsequent blog posts explaining her giving approach.
The Harvard Business School's Working Knowledge did a study to look at patterns in her giving. They developed a data-driven portrait from different sources, starting with a list of 1,964 recipients listed on her Yield Giving website.
Study findings showed that Scott tended to target a handful of umbrella organizations each year. Much of her funding went for under served populations.
As examples, many of her largest grants went to the foundations or fundraising arms of historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) and Hispanic-serving institutions—colleges and universities where 25 percent or more of students are Hispanic.
All 50 US states included at least one recipient of her giving; both rural or urban organizations. She gave somewhat more heavily to organizations based in the southern US.
Over a five year period she appeared to give based on changing needs.
The study's authors observed that while she seemed to have a scattered approach, the data showed a pattern that represents a different and new way of giving.
Early reports suggest that Scott’s hands off unrestricted gifts have had a profound effect on the aspirations and financial viability of the organizations that received them.
Scott wrote on Medium, “I asked a team of advisors to help me accelerate my 2020 giving through immediate support to people suffering the economic effects of the crisis. They took a data-driven approach to identifying organizations with strong leadership teams and results, with special attention to those operating in communities facing high projected food insecurity, high measures of racial inequity, high local poverty rates, and low access to philanthropic capital.”
Based on the data the researchers said that her approach suggested an impatience to give away her wealth, a belief in giving as a way to empower the good works of others, and an unusual willingness to cede control. They said, "while the long-term impacts remain to be seen, the differences in her approach from those of other mega-donors is striking."
"Our city is the capital of transformation. Our city has no borders."
Clara Brugada had a big idea; a vision if you will, even before she was elected as the Mayor of Mexico City. She would transform spaces as utopias.
Working in conjunction with Bloomberg Philanthropy Fifteen utopias have been built; A library was created out of a Boeing 737, a sand park was created across from a prison because families can travel long distances and there was no where for them to go. The current costs of the utopias average about $5.3 million. The mayor wants to see 100 spaces.
In The Intercept - An Auschwitz memorial service will take place next week in Poland. Some Holocaust survivors are speaking out against Poland's offer to Netanyahu allowing him to attend the memorial without fear of arrest. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is wanted for alleged war crimes by the International Criminal Court (ICC). Holocaust survivor, Gabor Maté, 81, described Poland's Prime Minister, Donald Tusk’s offer as “a travesty, a betrayal of all humane principles and international law. He said that the prime minister does not represent the ‘Jewish nation.'An increasing number of Jews internationally are appalled by the horrors inflicted in their name by the state he leads.”
In Democracy Now- Doing what formal international institutions can’t or apparently are not ready to do, including the International Criminal Court (ICC), a nonprofit based in Belgium called the Hind Rajab Foundation, has filed lawsuits that hold individual Israeli soldiers accountable for war crimes including the targeting of civilian and the destruction of homes.
Much of the evidence came from the soldiers’ on line boasts and celebrations of their war crimes. The nonprofit which is gaining volunteers around the globe is named after 6-year-old Hind Rajab, who was killed, along with her family, in a January 2024 Israeli attack. During the interview co-founder, Dyab Abou Jahjah, strongly urged the international community to step up and take responsibility as the Foundation was doing a job that they should be doing. (posted January 15, 2025)
In +972 - In collaboration with the Guardian, and with leaked documents obtained by Drop Site News, + 972 discovered that Microsoft has significant business dealings with Israel's major military infrastructures. Sales of "Microsoft's" cloud and artificial intelligence services to the Israeli Army skyrocketed with the beginning of the war on Gaza. In October 2023, the army's monthly consumption of AI services provided by Azure jump sevenfold compared to the month proceeding the war; by March 2024 it was 64 times higher.
The company has provided the Israeli military with extensive access to OpenAI’s GPT-4 language model, the engine behind ChatGPT. The Israel defense force (IDF) has used Microsoft’s Azure cloud services for its air ground and naval forces as well as its elite intelligence squad, Unit 8200. According to the leaked documents, the army used Azure to manage a population registry and to track Palestinians’ movements in the West Bank and in Gaza. Azure was also used by the Airforce’s OFEK unit which is responsible for managing large databases of potential targets for lethal air strikes.
The documents indicate that these tools were used for operational purposes such as combat and intelligence. Furthermore, Israel’s military intelligence purchased private development meetings and professional workshops from Microsoft costing millions of dollars. Between October 2023 and June 2024 alone the Israel defense ministry spent $10 million to purchase 19,000 hours of engineering support from Microsoft.
How were the Nazis able to locate and kill so many Jewish people during the Holocaust? IBM equipment played a key role. It was intertwined with the Nazi regime, perhaps as Microsoft and Google, along with other companies, apparently are today with Israel. Transparency is needed.
The inauguration of Donald Trump, his second round as President, took place on January 20, 2024 with record breaking funds. To put things in perspective, The coronation of Prince Charles was $91 million, the highest cost in 200 years. Previous presidents have typically adopted self-imposed limitations on their inaugural fundraising — President Barack Obama capped individual contributions to his 2009 inauguration at $53,000 and President George W. Bush capped them at $250,000 . President Joe Biden raised nearly $62 million. America’s new president , Donald Trump, inaugurated on January 20, 2025 . has reportedly raised $250 million. Writing for Open Secrets, in 2018 writer Alex Baumgart followed a pay to play loophole associated with President Trump’s first inauguration.
In Candid: Philanthropy News Digest - The St. Paul-Based Bush Foundation is funding the Leech Lake Band of Ojibwe and White Earth Foundation for $7.7 million to promote indigenous education across Minnesota. The funding will enable a five-year project to develop curricula in alignment with Minnesota's constitutional mandate of 2023; the Indigenous Education for all (IEFA) legislation. The law elevates indigenous narratives that include Native history, culture, sovereignty, and socioeconomic experience toward addressing past disparities and supporting self determination.
(IEFA legislation is also in Montana. The state has had challenges related to uneven implementation and lack of accountability which have led to a class action lawsuit).
JANUARY 2025 - While data has been skewed somewhat by the pandemic years, the trend toward private school enrollment was slower than expected, but steadily climbing. Enrollment in private schools are likely to pick up under the new US Administration. Pending her confirmation hearing, Linda McMahon as Secretary of Education falls on the side of school choice. On his website, Truth Social, President Trump said” that Linda Mahone will fight tirelessly to expand choice to every state in America…".
PROPUBLICA has put together a user-friendly database matching comparing private schools with surrounding public school districts. Results by state, religious affiliation, school type and enrollment range are easily accessed. The regional database covers the South, Northeast, Midwest, and the West.
A large majority of students currently enrolled in private schools are white.
In EDSOURCE - immigration - Rose Lopez, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union of Kern County says there are first-hand account showing that border patrol agents are broadly targeting immigration communities in gas stations, restaurants, farmworkers while they are traveling to work and even a Home Depot parking lot where day laborers look for work.
The chief patrol agent for the El Centro sector in imperial County said that his operation was aimed at protecting communities from "bad people and bad things". A Bakersfield City Council member said the families that he represented were being harassed intimidated and terrorized by border patrol agents.
What will children experience with the proposed new US immigration policies? As a taste of what might be coming soon: students are scared in Kern County California. Belen Carrasco, a middle school teacher at Bakersfield City School, noticed an increase in absences. Her students reported that border patrol agents were knocking on their doors and in one case they detained a parent. Some children have been hidden in their houses. Families are afraid to go to food distribution centers. Many don’t know their constitutional rights.
Above all families are looking for assurance at schools are safe places that will not alert immigration authorities to their immigration status. However, the US administration has cleared the way for arrests in schools and other formerly sensitive places.
A federal judge temporarily blocked Trump’s executive order to end birthright citizenship, calling it “blatantly unconstitutional.” The policy sought to deny citizenship to children born in the U.S. to noncitizen parents, violating the 14th Amendment. Judge John Coughenour cited over a century of legal precedent, including United States v. Wong Kim Ark. Lawsuits from 22 states argue the policy could harm children by leaving them stateless. While paused for now, the case may ultimately reach the Supreme Court.
In The Insider - "While the U.S., UK, and right-wing EU governments are tightening migration laws, Spain is actively attracting foreigners. In 2024, this policy allowed the country to increase production, and annual GDP growth is forecast to exceed 3%. Meanwhile, unemployment has dropped to its lowest point in more than a decade, and GDP per capita is also on the rise, even if its growth is less pronounced....
"Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez is convinced that migrants do not represent an added burden, but a “guarantee of well-being.” Hoping to address the country's demographic and economic challenges, Spanish authorities have recently approved reforms that will further simplify the legalization and integration of foreigners."
JANUARY 2025 - The White House has made its list and it is checking it twice. It only took a moment once the new president was seated to put his signature on executive orders and issue a preordained firestorm going after immigrants. Four immigration officials were removed from the DOJ which oversees immigration courts . Some immigration analysts and former ICE officials say that the Trump campaign's goal of deporting many of the roughly 11 million unauthorized immigrants in the U.S. will be expensive and logistically challenging. Where will people go? The majority of detention beds are private companies. Not the least, as another challenge, Transactional Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) formally of Syracuse University, has reported on the ICE's poor record keeping in the past. TRAC, as perhaps the most critical resource available to the public and scholars to track immigration happenings is apparently no longer available.
What does Trump's war on immigrants mean if it is fully implemented. Well, it is a drastic change in the labor force. In notes from Economics' possible scenarios, "while we expect deportations to run above their current levels, this scenario does not foresee millions of deportations as this would cause food prices to rise given that nearly half of the agricultural workforce is made up of undocumented immigrants;4 voter anger with high food prices was a significant factor in the election outcome...The economy is expected to run weaker for longer as rising trade tensions and the sustained enforcement of the new immigration policy keep consumption growth in the red for most of the forecast....The policy of mass deportations would likely have a profound effect on industries like agriculture and hospitality, where undocumented workers make up a significant share of the total workforce."
Ben Rand writing for Harvard Business School's "Working Knowledge" returns to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, to counter the belief that immigrants take away American jobs when there is also evidence that they might actually benefit the growth of American jobs while their absence could negatively impact the economy.
JANUARY 2025 - In The Conversation - Michelle Lazarus and co-author present the use of AI as a destructive tool due to a settler colonialism mentality buried deeply in the past. They note that modern nations, such as the United States and Australia, are examples of settler colonies. However, indigenous knowledge providing different ways of knowing can transform AI as a tool for good by incorporating First Nations technologies. Examples given include the sustainable fishing practices of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders or the Inuit practice of carving bones into snow goggles or waterproofing canoes with raw bitumen.
Disappearing languages reflect lost indigenous practices that have relevance to combating climate change. A Lakota Language Learning Model project is using a locally developed AI to preserve the native Lakota language. A Indigenous AI Abundant Intelligences research program is exploring how to develop technology grounded in First Nations ways of knowing that “recognize the abundant multiplicity of ways of being intelligent in the world”.
Also, in The Conversation - There are other points of views regarding some of the risks AI brings to indigenous knowledge systems including, as one example, the ownership of artwork.
In Democracy Now - January 23, 2024 - "President Trump ordered the United States to withdraw from the U.N.’s World Health Organization, putting numerous WHO programs at risk, including efforts to tackle tuberculosis and HIV/AIDS....WHO plays a crucial role in protecting the health and security of the world’s people, including Americans, by addressing the root causes of disease, building stronger health systems, and detecting, preventing and responding to health emergencies, including disease outbreaks, and often in dangerous places where others cannot go....In addition to pulling out of the World Health Organization, the Trump administration has frozen communications by many federal health agencies, including public health updates, and canceled upcoming meetings as the National Institutes of Health and other agencies."
JANUARY 2025 - From Ted Talks - Can AI help a remote village in Africa and those in war torn regions with rapidly changing conditions? Health systems entrepreneur, surgeon and TED Fellow Mohamed Aburawi explores how his digital health platform, Speetar, uses AI to bridge the healthcare gap in under-served regions, like his native Libya, by connecting patients with doctors who truly understand their needs. Yes, AI can help, but only if it is less an import from the West and more based on an understanding of the cultural context.
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