Do you expect your government to be honest? Well they haven't been completely honest so far about our climate emergency, but I'm glad at last they have come out with an honest message informing us of the real situation, so listen carefully.
The US military’s carbon bootprint is enormous. Like corporate supply chains, it relies upon an extensive global network of container ships, trucks, and cargo planes to supply its operations with everything from bombs to humanitarian aid and hydrocarbon fuels. Our new study calculated the contribution of this vast infrastructure to climate change.
Greenhouse gas emission accounting usually focuses on how much energy and fuel civilians use. But recent work, including our own, shows that the US military is one of the largest polluters in history, consuming more liquid fuels and emitting more climate-changing gases than most medium-sized countries. If the US military were a country, its fuel usage alone would make it the 47th largest emitter of greenhouse gases in the world, sitting between Peru and Portugal.
In 2017, the US military bought about 269,230 barrels of oil a day and emitted more than 25,000 kilotons of carbon dioxide by burning those fuels. The US Air Force purchased $4.9 billion worth of fuel, and the Navy $2.8 billion, followed by the Army at $947 million and the Marines at $36 million.
It’s no coincidence that US military emissions tend to be overlooked in climate change studies. It’s very difficult to get consistent data from the Pentagon and across US government departments. In fact, the United States insisted on an exemption for reporting military emissions in the 1997 Kyoto Protocol. This loophole was closed by the Paris Accord, but with the Trump administration due to withdraw from the accord in 2020, this gap will will return.
Roll on Cop-out 26, let's see what formula you produce to stop the impending man made climate disaster, and let's see how the various states follow through. Capitalism will trump climate change, unless we destroy capitalism, it will continue to destroy the planet and our existence on that planet. Just remember, Planet Earth has no escape capsule.
The following from World Review:
A court ruling in India has delivered an urgent message this week - not just for their country’s own government, but for the world: “In my considered opinion, citizens are conscience keepers of government in any democratic nation,” said the judge. “The offence of sedition cannot be invoked to minister to the wounded vanity of the governments.”
With these words, the judge released on bail the 22-year-old Indian climate activist, Disha Ravi. Her alleged offence? Editing and sharing an online “toolkit” which advised fellow activists on how to support the country’s farmers’ protests’.
The protests, which farmers argue are necessary to defend their livelihoods in the face of new laws, have rocked the nation since last summer - becoming a symbol of wider revolt against both deregulated capitalism and state oppression, as Ravinder Kaur has written.
Ravi’s post was consequently widely shared, including by the Swedish environmentalist Greta Thunberg. Yet the kickback to the toolkit was also swift: within hours, the hashtag #GretaThunbergExposed was circulating on Twitter, implying the climate campaigner was part of an international conspiracy against India.
Effigies of Thunberg and other supportive international celebrities were burned in the streets, President Narendra Modi later appeared to echo the sentiment, claiming that some “foreign powers” were engaged in systematic efforts to “malign” the image of Indian tea, while the Delhi police alleged that Ravi was part of a global conspiracy to defame India and stir unrest.
This week’s court ruling has attempted to squash these dangerous claims: “The freedom of speech and expression include the right to seek a global audience,” added the judge.
Protecting the environment has surely got to be A Good Thing.
Creating “protected areas” for nature in various parts of the world might therefore seem to be a positive move.
However, when these areas are being promoted by the same capitalist system which brought nature to her knees in the first place, the alarm lights start flashing!
Protected Areas” are in fact one aspect of the global capitalist scam being sold to us under the label of the ‘New Deal for Nature’.
Because, in typical capitalist style, this scam has been wrapped up in shiny green packaging and promoted by the well-known WWF, the New Deal for Nature initially attracted little opposition.
But in recent weeks, thanks to the truth-spreading efforts of the No Deal for Nature campaign and its supporters, support has been slipping away.
The human rights charity Survival International has been doing a great job of blowing the whistle on what is nothing other than a new phase of industrial capitalist imperialism, aiming to displace indigenous peoples and further exploit Mother Nature for the profit of the usual tiny and greedy elite.
Warns Survival director Stephen Corry: “The latest idea to be heavily promoted by big conservation NGOs is doubling the world’s so-called ‘Protected Areas’ (PAs) so that they cover thirty percent of the globe’s lands and oceans.
“This is now their main rallying cry and response to two of the world’s biggest problems — climate chaos and loss of biodiversity.
“It’s a marketing gimmick designed to funnel even more money to those who have for decades demonstrated their failure to mitigate either climate change or biodiversity loss.
“Many PAs aren’t really protected at all. They include industrial exploitation — mining, logging, plantations, trophy hunting concessions, or extensive, usually high-end, tourist infrastructure.
“The locals are thrown out as the land is grabbed by one or other industry, partnering with one or other big conservation NGO.
“It’s a new colonialism, the world’s biggest land grab, supposedly ‘green’ and supposedly to save the world — a really big lie. As Odette, a Baka woman from Congo, says of such imposed conservation projects which don’t work, ‘We’ve had enough of this talk of ‘boundaries’ in the forest. The forest is ours’.”
The alert is also being sounded via the World Rainforest Movement, notably in a statement entitled “Protected Areas feed corporate profiting and destruction”.
No one earns billions of dollars. You have to steal that kind of money.
There is nothing to admire in the money hoarding, cheating ways of the billionaires.
They want us to believe that their business model is based on their hard work. They want us to believe that they are richer than us, because they are better and smarter than us.
Their story claims that they are "self-made".
Their story is false - they have stolen their wealth using capitalism's bogus business model.
Capitalism's Bogus Business Model
- exploit workers, crush unions, don't pay a living wage, gig economy
- never acknowledge responsibility, or pay for, environmental damage
- avoid and evade taxes
- push for more government subsidies and bailouts
- privatize profits, publicize losses
- employ shady accounting practices
- use corruption, lies, coverups and cheats
- sell junk/planned obsolescence
- debut constant upgrades
- spend $1 trillion/yr on mind and behaviour altering advertising and propaganda
We have all been the victims of the billionaire's bogus business model, which is premised on endless growth, based on infinite resource extraction from a finite planet. We can now see that model has lead us to the brink of collapse.It is important for us to ground ourselves in our own reality, and have a support network that allows us to join together to cooperatively figure things out. They want us atomized and weak, so joining together in solidarity is the obvious response.As hard as it may be, we need to end this parasitic relationship. You may feel that what is happening in the world of business is not right. Trust that you are correct in feeling this way. There is nothing right about the billionaires.
We are pleased that this a place where that can happen. It wouldn't be possible without you, and we are grateful for your participation in this project.
It is more effective to light the candle of truth, than to curse the darkness of the billionaires plan for us."Anyone who cheers for any billionaire to win anything is a pathetic bootlicking loser. Billionaires are worthless, parasitical, untalented, unnecessary middlemen.
“Philanthropy” is just another billionaire narrative control tool, same as buying media outlets and funding think tanks.
Build a library named after yourself and you’ve got this “philanthropist” label that pundits use so that people call you that instead of “parasitic sociopath”.
If wealth had anything to do with hard work, single moms would be the billionaires."
- Caitlin Johnstone
“The world nowadays teems with people who have fits of enthusiasm whenever they hear of state intervention, planned economy, five-year plans, and the end of laissez-faire. They do not care to ask who are the social groups in whose interests the state, ie. bureaucracy and the party in power, is to intervene and plan. “Yet the first question which should be asked when invoking the end of laissez-faire is precisely this: in the interests of whom should such abolition take place?”
When Gaetano Salvemini wrote these words, he wasn’t referring to the 2020s, but he might as well have been. There are plenty of anti-capitalist comrades out there, who, even when they oppose the limited content of a Green New Deal or a New Deal for Nature, are tempted to give such schemes the benefit of the doubt in that they appear to be a step in the right direction, away from the unchecked market forces of “laissez-faire” capitalism.
But, as Salvemini points out, we need to look carefully at who exactly is pushing these economic plans and whose interests they are designed to serve. Here, the hard work has already been done for us by investigative journalist Cory Morningstar and other writers featured on our Climate Capitalists page of links.
The briefest dip beneath the fake green surface of this contemporary political pond reveals it to be less a source of environmental and social hope than a rancid cesspit of private interests. We find ourselves deep within a massive global network of organisations and initiatives with names like the World Resources Institute, The B-Team, We Mean Business, Tomorrow’s Capitalism, The Natural Capital Coalition and Corporate Impact X. Here we can have the pleasure of meeting a former CEO of Unilever, the daughter of a CIA-backed Latin American president, the powerful founder and executive chairman of the World Economic Forum or a Silicon Valley billionaire hoping to get even richer through a “Fourth Industrial Revolution”. In this strange upside-down world, in which Big Business is going to “save the planet”, we come across brave “solo” campaigners supported and promoted every inch of the way by international PR professionals, youth movements described as “grassroots” which are in fact funded and steered from above, high-profile activist “rebellions” cheered on by venture capitalists.
We hear talk of “exponential opportunities“, “the investment of trillions of dollars“, and a “transformation unlike anything humankind has experienced before... a fusion of technologies that is blurring the lines between the physical, digital, and biological spheres”.
In short, as Morningstar explains, the so-called Green New Deal is being promoted “as the catalyst to unlock the 100 trillion dollars required to unleash the ‘fourth industrial revolution’. This project, of unparalleled magnitude, is the vehicle to save the failing global capitalist economic system and bring in the financialization of nature”. Having found the answer to the question recommended by Salvemini, we might reflect that it is not exactly surprising to find capitalism manoeuvring to incite state support for its money-making activities.
It was in 1469 that the banker Lorenzo Medici observed: “Things can go badly for the rich if they don’t run the state”. It is a big mistake to fall for the capitalist lie that their world of “market forces” somehow operates independently of the existence of states. We perhaps might expect that naivety from advocates of the oxymoronic absurdity known as “anarcho-capitalism”, but it is strange to witness anti-capitalists likewise imagining that the involvement of state machineries in capitalist activities will inevitably act as some kind of brake on profiteering.
Capitalism has always depended on the existence of a state in order to impose and enforce its domination. Indeed, we would argue that the state only exists in the first place as a tool of the wealthy elite. Its role has always been to rubber-stamp, with its self-proclaimed “authority”, the theft from the majority carried out by a greedy and self-interested minority. It is the state that announces that “property” is sacred and lawful and that any attempt to take it back amounts to “crime”. It is the state that physically protects the property and wealth of the rich by employing gangs of thugs to intimidate, attack or imprison anyone who threatens to confiscate it, by whatever means.
It is the state that legitimises and enforces the expulsion of people from their land, that cuts them off from subsistence, from communal autonomy, and forces them into the waiting jaws of capitalist wage slavery. It is the state that raises armies and navies to conquer foreign lands so that its capitalists can plunder, cheat and exploit still further afield. It is the state that taxes the population, ostensibly in “our” interest, only to divert vast amounts of collective wealth into the pockets of capitalists, whether via their highly lucrative construction schemes (needed for “our” infrastructure), via their profitable arms dealing (needed for “our” defence) or, today, via their pseudo-green technologies (needed to save “our” planet).
When state and capital work together in a more visible way, as with the planned “Green New Deal” and “New Deal for Nature”, this does not mean that capitalism is on the retreat. It just means that, in order to get through a period of crisis, capitalists are, once again, pretending that their interests are “our” interests, that we are all facing an “emergency situation”, that “our” future is at risk and that, therefore, trillions of dollars of public money should be stuffed, by the state, into the pockets of our capitalist saviours.
Gaetano Salvemini book Those who persist in seeing a state-intervention version of capitalism as necessarily a step in the right direction, would do well to heed Salvemini’s study of one particular “limited planned economy deferential to capitalism”, which just happened to be the Fascist regime in Italy.
He wrote: “Italy has never seen anything similar to the type of planning exhibited by the government of Soviet Russia. When an important branch of the banking system, or a large-scale industry which could be confused with ‘the higher interests of the nation’, has threatened to collapse, the government has stepped into the breach and prevented the breakdown by emergency measures.
“The policies of the Italian dictatorship during these years of world crisis have been no different in their aims, methods, and results from the policies of all the governments of the capitalistic countries. The Charter of Labour says that private enterprise is responsible to the state. In actual fact, it is the state, i.e. the taxpayer, who has become responsible to private enterprise. When the depression came, the government added the loss to the taxpayer’s burden. Profit is private and individual. Loss is public and social”.
Salvemini summed up the overall impact of Fascist state intervention in the dealings of “laissez-faire” capitalism, by concluding: “The intervention of government has invariably favoured big business”. (3)
Why would we expect things to be any different today?
Read the full article and poster HERE:Wherever we are situated in this society, our future boils down to two options: accepting our fate and trying to reduce the harm to our bodies and the environment on a piecemeal basis—or actively resisting in order to interrupt the disaster and implement our own solutions. If there is anything that scientists, sociologists, military strategists, and day laborers all agree on, it is that we are headed for global collapse.
Those who hold power seek to take advantage of hurricanes, forest fires, and pandemics to impose more and more invasive forms of control on us. Their responses to crises always prioritize protecting their own privileges and profits while they treat the rest of us as expendable. We can’t trust our survival to their expertise.
If we resign ourselves to the future implied by catastrophic climate change, widespread pollution, and ecological collapse, sooner or later, the disaster will come for us. In some parts of the world, people are already forced to wear masks when they leave the house just to protect themselves from poisoned air, toxic waste, or infectious conditions.
If we do not accept the destruction of our lives, our land, our food, and everything that connects us with each other and the biosphere as a whole, we have to fight to regain control over the conditions of our lives and the decisions that determine our survival. In a world of police, prisons, surveillance cameras, we will have to wear masks that conceal who we are so we can fight for what we really want.
Table of ContentsRead the full article HERE:
A concern of ‘each and every one’
Green capitalism
Forecasts and the misery of the political world
Smart cities
In the past weeks we could experience relatively high temperatures again. So one heat record year beats the next. British climate researchers recently presented a model to calculate the temperature rise in the metropolises until 2050. Vienna is one of the cities most affected, with a temperature rise of 7.6 degrees Celsius compared to 1850, the year that is more or less considered the beginning of the Industrial Revolution.
The consequences of global warming are melting of sea ice and glaciers, sea level rise, thawing of permafrost soils (which will release even more CO2), growing drought zones and desertification, increasing weather extremes, extinction of species, etc.
In addition, there would be further social, political and economic aggravations. Like famines and water shortages, deaths and illnesses caused by the enormous heat and epidemics, wars over dwindling resources and usable territories and a global migration movement. Just to name a few.
To pick out just one aspect here: If we remember how the political classes and European politicians reacted to the so-called “refugee crisis” in 2015. When we saw how borders were militarized, plans of action developed and powers for the military and police expanded. Not to mention the agitation of the mass media and the general racism, nationalism and panic that has been fostered by politicians, media and other opinion makers. And this was about a more or less still calculable number of people, in relation to what will happen if more and more parts of the earth become uninhabitable. Depending on how fast and drastically these developments will take place, we are talking about the largest migration movement in the history of the human race!
The fascists and conservatives have already spoken of mass migration in 2015/2016 in order to propagate their policy of isolation. Concepts such as the “great exchange” have come up since then and various horror scenarios have been fantasized in order to achieve a racist and nationalist mobilization. Thus it is not foreseeable what reactions a migration movement of several 100 million people would trigger.
A concern of ‘each and every one’
The ‘Point of no Return’ is crossed! Climate change is a reality, the changes are already happening, they can be felt. And these developments cannot be stopped by individual waste separation, energy saving, veganism, etc. Many appeals are directed at consumer behaviour. So the problem is made an individual problem of each of us. You can do something about it yourself’, ’10 things you can do to stop climate change’.
They’re supposed to tell us: We humans are all in the same boat. We are all responsible for this. So change your lifestyle… Repent and become better people!
This equates the responsibility of business, industry and the political sector with the responsibility of all of us. Every question of class and ownership is thus eliminated. But are we really all responsible to the same extent as those who actively earn money from the fact that our whole world is going down the drain? I don’t think so!
Athens, Greece: Obsidian: Against Nations, all out on the 18th January against the state
Anarchy if anything is total opposition to the nation state. Anarchists don’t just critique or hold a strong suspicion of states, our movement was founded on their negation. This new decade is a new era for nations, one that will likely break them from their historical model. Within this vaccuum our ideals will be increasingly relevant and thrive if able to adapt. The opposite is true for the left wing of capital, those Marxists and liberals who already look like caricatures from the past. For this reason we must vigorously oppose any compromise with old ideas. Our world is moving too fast to look back.
Our current moment is a train crash of climate emergency, forced migration, mass information, war and growing population. To say the old system is only breaking is an understatement. It broke long ago and is now collapsing under it’s own weight like the many empires before it. Unfortunately the same common history still applies, new beginnings come after violent, unpredictable ends.
As anarchists in this climate of increasing social instability we should not only say the things only we can say. But take action that makes our antistate position clear. Reminding all that compromise has never ended authority, no matter how comfortable a fantasy. Leaving traditional opposition to wither and watch their own states break apart and lash out with dictatorships.
In Athens, Europe and the world so many ask when the desperation will end. This question fuels uncontrollable rage directed at the parasite latched onto our collective body. Individuals are sick of asking obvious questions, losing the little ground gained over past decades. As the light at the end of the tunnel dims, a vicious fire lights the way.
Support anarchy against nations
Destabilize the repressive machine
Retake and expand space that pains dominant society.
All out on the 18th January against the state. Kaniggos Square. 6:30pm Athens
Every day the news gets worse. Millions of people are displaced by record-breaking heatwaves and droughts, violent mega-storms and flash floods. Unprecedented wildfires burn out of control, scorching massive tracts of forest and brush, and plunging nearby urban metropolises into surreal scenes of mid-afternoon darkness. Meanwhile, scientists solemnly inform us that marine life could be wiped out by mid-century, as the oceans continue to be gradually transformed from vibrant areas of rich biodiversity into the plastic-filled graveyards of industrial civilization. Try as we might... the consequences of our consequence-free lifestyles are becoming harder and harder to ignore.
It’s become widely accepted that ‘global warming’ exists, and that our societies’ current rates of carbon emission are imperiling future generations. Millions of people agree that we are robbing our unborn descendants of their right to an inhabitable planet – something that their ancestors foolishly took for granted. This increasing awareness is translating into a growing consensus that our so-called ‘leaders’ need to intervene in order to fix this problem and correct this historic injustice. Unfortunately, most environmental activists continue to be hampered by a false understanding of how power operates in society, the scale of the problem that we face... and what would actually be required to fix it. In Trouble 23, subMedia takes a closer look at these dynamics, arguing for the importance of taking bold action to defend local bioregions, even as we work towards the total overthrow and replacement of the global capitalist economy.
