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Two Turkish F-16's shot down a Russian-made SU-24 jet on Nov. 24 near the Syrian border after it violated Turkish airspace, presidential sources said.

Turkey shot down the jet after it failed to heed the warnings within the rules of engagement.

Initial reports said the jet belonged to Russia, but presidential sources later clarified that the jet's nationality was unknown.

The Turkish Armed Force also stated that the jet of “unknown nationality” had been warned 10 times in five minutes about its violation of the border.

Meanwhile, a Turkish official told Reuters that two warplanes approached Turkish border and were warned before one of them was shot down.

The jet was Russian SU-24. One pilot was killed and the body is in the hands of "rebels". At the of a video the "rebels" made of the dead pilot they call themselves "mujahideen". One picture shows the body with two bullet holes in the chests suggesting that he was illegally executed. A rebel source claims that he was shot while parachuting from the burning plane. That is a war crime under the Geneva Convention. A second pilot was probably wounded but was said to have landed somewhere in Syrian army covered territory. The search for him is ongoing.

Russia's official version of the incident is remarkably different from Turkey's:

Today an aircraft from the Russian air group in the Syrian Arab Republic crashed on the territory of Syria supposedly shot down from the ground.

The aircraft was flying at the altitude of 6 000 metres. The status of the Russian pilots is being defined.

According to the preliminary data, the pilots managed to eject from the warplane.

The circumstances of the crash are being defined.

During all the flight time, the aircraft was flying only within the borders of the Syrian territory. That was registered by objective monitoring data.

The Russian version leaves it open who shot the plane down. Is that meant to deescalate?

Turkey claims that the red line here shows the flightpath of the Russian plane.

If that is correct than the (alleged) violation of Turkey's airspace was for just some 5 seconds and would in no way justify to shot down the plane. Just Friday Turkey "warned" Russia over attacks on "Turkmen" in Syria. This then was not legitimate air-defense but an ambush. Most NATO country will shake their heads over the irresponsible Turkish behavior and will not get further involved such lunacy.

So there will likely be no war over this but a lot of strong statements will be issued. NATO councils and the UN Security Council may meet. But the propaganda preparation for war is targeted at the Islamic State and Syria, not at Russia.

In a separate incident two Russian journalists covering the Syrian army were wounded by a projectile from the "rebels".

The Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov canceled his visit to Turkey which was planned for tomorrow. After having lost many "western" tourists Turkey will now also lose the last Russian guests. There are many hotels in Antalya that will have to close down. Turkey's energy supplies depend on Russian (and Iranian) gas. The shooting down of the plane may lead to "technical problems" with those supplies. The PKK fighting the state in Turkey's east may soon have a new sponsor and modern weapon supplies.

The area where the plane came down is in Latakia, some 3.5 kilometers from the Turkish border. It is in the hand of what Turkey calls "Turkmen" which may mean imported Uighur and Uzbek Islamist fighters - mujahideen like they call themselves in the video. They are now already under sharply increased artillery fire. They may soon have to endure some very violent direct attacks by Russian special forces. Future Russian air-to-ground attacks in the area will be flown with "top cover" from additional fighter jets ready to engage the Turks with the very best Russian weapons as soon as they make the tiniest mistake.

In short. This Turkish escalation step will be answered.

UPDATE: Putin just held a press conference with the Jordan King Abdullah on his side(!) and boy was he pissed. Some major points:

• Confirms Turkish version of air-to-air missile but says plane was in Syrian airspace
• Describes Turkish attack as "a stab in the back by accomplices of terrorists"
• "Together with our US partners we signed an agreement to prevent" incidents like this
• "Ankara will discuss this tragedy with NATO as if it was Russia who shot down their jet. Does Turkey want NATO to serve ISIS goals?"
• Accuses Turkey of financing, protecting ISIS
• Turkey doing oil business with ISIS
• This will have serious consequences for Russian-Turkish relations

Vine makes his argument by comprehensively detailing the profligate, unsustainable spending on overseas bases, which is undertaken with little to no meaningful oversight by Congressional representatives. This spending is the main driver in perennial budget deficits. It also carries a tremendous opportunity cost. Direly needed investments in infrastructure, education and social programs are neglected at the expense of runaway military costs outside the country.

Beyond demonstrating that military buildup overseas is inefficient and wasteful, Vine reveals a deeper societal critique that manifests itself in the country’s military policy. “Force,” Vine notes, “has become one of America’s fundamental policy maxims.”

Rather than a noble instrument of beneficence, the U.S. military is a blunt projection of American power, radically opposed to the ideals of democracy and human rights it purports to represent. This gap between perception and reality has been cultivated for decades to serve the aims of the ruling class.

The notion that the U.S. needs to cover the globe in military bases emerged among elite planners in the buildup to World War II. Behind this policy, which is now taken for granted, is a pathological paranoia that demands absolute American hegemony.

“Even before the United States entered World War II, Roosevelt and other leaders had started developing a vision of the world as intrinsically threatening, in which any instability and danger, no matter how small or far removed from the United States, was seen as a vital threat,” Vine writes.

Immediately thereafter, the vast military buildup that President Dwight D. Eisenhower would famously label the “military-industrial complex” began. The complex that Eisenhower warned about has grown exponentially in the 50 years since, morphing into what investigative journalist Nick Turse calls the “military-industrial-technological-entertainment-academic-scientific-media-intelligence-homeland security-surveillance-national security-corporate complex.”

Military spending now accounts for 54% of discretionary spending in the entire federal budget ($599 billion of $1.1 trillion). Vine calculates that overseas bases account for anywhere between $71 – $120 billion of military spending. That is to say, bases abroad cost as much as four times the amount spent on Social Security, Unemployment & Labor ($29 billion); nearly twice as much as Housing and Community ($63 billion); four times as much as Science ($30 billion); and 1.7 times as much as Education ($70 billion).

Foreign bases generate enormous corporate profits. Contracting firms like Lockheed Martin and former Halliburton subsidiary KBR spend feverishly on lobbying to keep the spigot flowing.

Yet while both factions of the business party are dedicated to austerity – with the Republican faction rabid in their zeal to curtail public spending – any discussion of cutting military spending is a non-starter in Washington.

Politicians of all stripes eagerly back anything the military asks for in order to avoid accusations of being unpatriotic and weak on security. The use of dishonest McCarthy-like rhetoric to cower the military’s overseers has proved a powerful weapon in preventing critical discourse from entering the public arena.

The lack of criticism has more serious repercussions than merely wasting taxpayer dollars and allowing an outdated strategy to go unchallenged. It allows actions that would be condemned in the most severe terms if they were committed by an official enemy to be ignored and hidden in the name of “supporting the troops.”

November 25, 2015 "Information Clearing House" -  Tyler Durden at Zero Hedge has posted the flight paths of the Russian aircraft according to Turkey and to Russia.

We know that Turkey is lying for three reasons.

One reason is that NATO governments lie every time that they open their mouths.

A second reason is that Turkey’s claim that the SU-24 was in Turkey’s airspace for 17 seconds but only traveled 1.15 miles means that the SU-24 was flying at stall speed! The entire Western media was too incompetent to do the basic math!

A third reason is that, assuming Turkey’s claim of a 17 second airspace violation is true, 17 seconds is not long enough for a Turkish pilot to get clearance for such a serious and reckless act as shooting down a Russian military aircraft. If the SU-24 was flying at a normal speed rather than one that would be unable to keep the aircraft aloft, the alleged airspace vioation would not have been long enough to be noticed. A shootdown had to have been pre-arranged. The Turks, knowing that the Russians were foolishly trusting to the agreement that there be no air to air encounters, told pilots to look for an opportunity. In my recent article, I gave a reason for this reckless act:

Turkey’s explanation to the UN Security Council gives itself away as a lie. The letter states: “This morning (24 November) 2 SU-24 planes, the nationality of which are unknown have approached Turkish national airspace. The Planes in quesion have been warned 10 times during a period of 5 minutes via ‘Emergency’ channel and asked to change their headings south immediately.”

As SU-24 are Russian aircraft, as Turkey is able to identify that the aircraft are SU-24s, how then can the nationality of the aircraft be unknown? Would Turkey risk shooting down a US or Israeli aircraft by firing at an unknown aircraft? If the SU-24 takes 17 seconds to fly 1.15 miles, the SU-24s would have only traveled 20.29 miles in five minutes. Does anyone believe that a supersonic aircraft can fly at stall speed for 17 seconds, much less for five minutes?

Do not expect any truth from any Western government or from any Western media. Governments and media know that the Western populations are uneducated, unaware, and can be relied upon to accept any preposterous story. In the West the Matrix has a firm grip. The Russians need to wake up to this fact.

NPR this morning confirmed that the media is a government propaganda organ. The Diane Rehm show on NPR presented us with a group of talking heads. Only one was informed, a professor at the Middle East Institute of the London School of Economics. The rest of the “experts” were the typical dumbshit Americans. They repeated all of the lies. “Russia is attacking everyone except ISIS.” How can there be anyone but ISIS to attack when the US general overseeing the area recently told Congress that “only 5” of our trained “rebels” remained? Yet the myth of “moderate rebels” is kept alive by these liars.

“The refugees are fleeing the brutal Assad.” Notice that it is always Assad who is brutal, not ISIS which has cut out opponents hearts and eaten them and routinely cuts off peoples heads and commits the most atrocious atrocities. Here we have “experts” blaming Assad. The “experts” said that the refugees are fleeing from Assad not from ISIS. The refugee problem is Assad’s fault, not the faut of ISIS. It is all Assad’s fault because he doesn’t give up and turn Syria over to Washington’s ISIS henchmen.

There was no acknowledgement from the “experts” that ISIS is a Washington creation or that until the Paris attack Washington was strongly backing ISIS with both words and weapons against the Russian air attacks that caught both Washington and ISIS off guard. This is extraordinary considering the fact that US responsibility for ISIS was acknowledged on TV by the former head of the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency.

Gullible Americans who give money to NPR are supporting lies and propaganda that have resulted in the deaths and dislocation of millions of peoples and that are leading to WWIII. The Western media whores are complicit in the crimes, because they fail their responsibility to hold government accountable and make it impossible for valid information to reach people. The Western media serves as cheerleaders for death and destruction.

Dr. Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy and associate editor of the Wall Street Journal. He was columnist for Business Week, Scripps Howard News Service, and Creators Syndicate. He has had many university appointments. His internet columns have attracted a worldwide following. Roberts' latest books are The Neoconservative Threat To International Order:  Washington’s Perilous War For Hegemony, The Failure of Laissez Faire Capitalism and Economic Dissolution of the West and How America Was Lost.

A violation of one to two kilometers is accepted as "natural" given the speed of aircraft, the statement [by the the General Staff] said. This year's violations of Turkish airspace lasted between 20 seconds and nine minutes, which showed "airspace violations can be resolved by warning and interceptions," the statement said.
Turkey could have downed 114 planes for airspace violations: Army June 25, 2012

Turkish fighter jets and military helicopters have dramatically increased their incursions into Greek airspace, according to a study based on data from the Greek military, forcing the cash-strapped Greek air force to respond.
Turkey buzzes weakened Greece - In growing numbers Ankara’s fighter jets test Greek territorial claims. - July 23, 2015

November 25, 2015 "Information Clearing House" - Turkey also regularly violates Iraq's airspace by flying bombing attacks against Kurds in north Iraq.

All this provides that yesterday's incident in which Turkey shot down a Russian jet was not a case of an ordinary airspace violation but a deliberate act to take down a Russian plane. The surviving co-pilot of the Russian jet insists that it neither flew through Turkish airspace nor was warned of an imminent attack. As I wrote yesterday:

This then was not legitimate air-defense but an ambush.

I am not the only one who came to that conclusion. Deep inside a McClatchy piece a "western" diplomat sees it as an "orchestrated" event:

One Western diplomat based in Iraq, but with extensive experience in Syria and Turkey, called the incident “brazenly orchestrated and inevitable,” but asked that the identification of his country not be used in the statement.

The Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov also came to that conclusion:

The downing of a Russian warplane in Syria by Turkey appears to be a pre-planned provocation, the Russian Foreign Minister said. Ankara failed to communicate with Russia over the incident, he added.

“We have serious doubts that this act was unintentional. It looks very much like a preplanned provocation,” Lavrov said, citing Turkey’s failure to maintain proper communication with Russia, the abundance of footage of the incident and other evidence.

Several NATO ambassadors will have had the same though when they admonished Ankara over the act:

"There are other ways of dealing with these kinds of incidents," said one diplomat who declined to be named.

The attack on the Russian plane was preconceived on November 22 when a security summit was held with the Turkish government under Prime Minister Davutoğlu and the Turkish Armed Forces. Davutoğlu personally gave the order to shoot down Russian planes. This, Turkey says, was necessary to stop Russian bombing of "Turkmen" in north Syria's Latakia near the Turkish border.

Many of the "Syrian Turkmen" fighting against the Syrian people are from Central Asia and part of the terrorist groups of Jabhat al-Nusra, Ansar Al Shams, Jabhat Ansar Ad Din and Ahrar al Shams. Uighurs smuggled in from China and fighting under the "Turkistan Islamist Party" label even advertise their ‘little jihadists’ children training camps in the area. The few real Syrian Turkmen work, as even the BBC admits, together with al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups. Their leader and spokesman, one Alparslan Celik, is a Turkish citizen from Elazığ.

The Turkish claim of defending "Turkmen" in Syria is a sham. It is defending mostly foreign Islamist terrorists.

Whoever planned the ambush on the Russian jet miscalculated the reaction. NATO will not come to Turkey's help over this or the next such incident. NATO countries know that the Russian plane was hit within Syria. Russia will not be scared into drawing back. Instead it massively increased the bombing of targets in that area:

At least 12 air strikes hit Latakia's northern countryside as pro-government forces clashed with fighters from al Qaeda's Nusra Front and Turkmen insurgents in the Jabal Akrad and Jabal Turkman areas, the British-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.

A Turkmen commander said missiles fired from Russian warships in the Mediterranean were also hitting the area, as well as heavy artillery shelling.

Russian jets also bombed insurgency supply trucks (video) in al-Qaeda controlled Azaz, north of Aleppo and just some two kilometers from the Turkish border. They also bombed the Bab al-Hawa border crossing to Turkey. That is a big FU to Erdogan.

The Russian missile cruiser Moskva with its extensive air defense systems is now covering the area. Russia will officially deploy two S-400 air defense systems to cover all of north-west Syria and southern Turkey. Russia also has lots of electronic wizardry it can (and will) apply. The preparation of additional airfields is ongoing. There will be no outward military revenge against Turkey unless it crosses into Syria. The "safe zone" within Syria Erdogan dreams of would have to be won by defeating Russian forces.

The 4.5 million Russian tourists who visited Turkey this year will not come again. Turkish business in Russia, mostly in the building industry and agricultural products, will shrink to nearly zero. That the scheming to take down a Russian air plane may have negative consequences for Turkey suddenly also dawned to Davutoğlu who now pretends that we wants to make nice again:

Turkey is not aiming to escalate tension with Russia, Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu said Nov. 25, echoing President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan following the downing of a SU-24 Russian jet the previous day.

“Russia is our friend and neighbor. Our bilateral communication channels are open. But our security, as for every friendly country, should be based on the principle of respect under international law. It’s normal to protect our national airspace,” Davutoğlu said, addressing party members in parliament.

And it is normal for Russia to defend its ally Syria. Against all enemies. By all means.

But back to Turkey's motive. The way this is played one might believe that this was a indeed a lonely Turkish idea to defend its immediate interests in Syria - the "Turkmen" as well as the oil business Erdogan's son has with the Islamic State.

But there is also a bigger game going on and it is likely that Erdogan has a new contract and Obama's backing for this escalation. James Winnefeld, the deputy chief of General Staff of the U.S. military, was in Ankara when the incident happened. The cooperation between U.S. and Turkish military and especially the air forces is quite tight. It is hard to believe that there was no communication about what was prepared to happen.

After the Islamic State attack in France President Hollande attempted to create a global coalition against IS which would include Russia and Iran as well as the U.S. led anti-ISIS block. But such a coalition, which makes a lot of sense, would have to agree to leave Syria alone and to help Syrian ground forces to effectively fight the Islamic State. It does not make sense to destroy the Syrian state and to just hope that the outcome would be something better than an emboldened IS or AlQaeda ruling in Damascus. That outcome is certainly not in Europe's interest. But a global coalition is not in U.S. or Turkish interests. It would end their common plans and efforts to overthrow the Syrian government and to install a "Sunni" state in Syria and Iraq as a Turkish protectorate.

The Russian jet incident decreased the likelihood of such a coalition. Holland, visiting Washington yesterday, had to pull back with his plan and was again degraded to parrot Obama's "Assad must go" nonsense. Obama feels emboldened and now pushes to widen the conflict in Syria:

The Obama administration is using the current moment of extreme anger and anxiety in Europe to press allies for sharp increases in their contributions to the fight against the Islamic State. Suggestions include more strike aircraft, more intelligence-sharing, more training and equipment for local fighters, and deployment of their own special operations ­forces.
...
While new contributions would be added to anti-Islamic State campaigns across the board, the attention is clearly on Syria, marking a shift in what began as an “Iraq first” focus when Obama authorized airstrikes in the region last fall.
...
Obama, speaking beside Hollande on Tuesday, restated his insistence that Assad is part of the problem, not the solution, and that he must go.

The Obama administration is also preparing to install the Turkish dream of a "safe zone" between Aleppo and the Turkish border north of it.

Among several coalition priorities in Syria, the United States has begun a series of airstrikes in an area known as the “Mar’a line,” named for a town north of Aleppo in the northwest. There, a 60-mile stretch to the Euphrates River in the east is the only remaining part of the Syria-Turkey border under Islamic State control.

The administration had delayed beginning operations in the area because U.S. aircraft were needed in operations farther east, and it has been uncertain that local opposition forces­ would be able to hold the territory if it could be cleared with airstrikes.

The increased Russian air defense and the likely increase of its deployed planes will make those "safe zone" plans impossible.

But Obama, in my conclusion, still wants to drag NATO into Syria and wants to assemble enough forces "against ISIS" to be able to overwhelm the Syrian government and its Russian protectors. If that does not work he at least hopes to give Russia the Afghanistan like "quagmire" in Syria he and other U.S. officials promised. The again increasing tensions with U.S. proxy Ukraine only help in that regard.

But there is even more to that plan. Just by chance (not) the NYT op-ed pages launch a trial balloon today for the creation of a Sunni state in east Syria and west Iraq. But that (Islamic) State is already there and the "containment" strategy Obama practices towards it guarantees that it will fester.

Obama continues his immensely destructive policies in the Middle East with zero regard to the all the bad outcomes these are likely to have for the people there as well as for Europe. One again wonders if all these action follow from sheer incompetence or from some devilish, ingenious strategic planning.

I think this is the essential question in fact. What is giving Turkey the courage to stand up to like this to Russia, which is so much bigger, both militarily and economically? We are talking about the same Turkey that has never even brought down a Greek jet; Greece, of course, being many times smaller in all ways than Turkey. You might also stop and recall that some time ago, Israeli war planes strayed into Turkish airspace while heading to Syria to bomb some facilities there; Turkey did nothing to those jets. In contrast, however, Turkey brought down the Russian plane, without much warning, after an airspace violation that lasted all of 17 seconds.

There are, of course, technical explanations for what happened. But to understand, from a political angle, why Turkey made this decision, calls for examination from a wider perspective.

Let us first make this clear: The decision to down the Russian plane was not one Turkey made alone. If it were, the reactions from various Western capitals would be different than what we are hearing now. It's clear now that Turkey -- more specifically, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan -- has picked up a new contract with the West, and that the downing of the Russian jet is just the first stage of this contract.

So what makes this all so clear now? A few essential signals. The first is the process of preparing domestic public opinion, which we have witnessed in recent days. The second is the statement made by US President Barack Obama after the plane came down. The third is the public statements we now hear coming from high-level offices in Turkey.

Let's start with the first signal, though. A project -- one which always seems to work with the Turkish public -- was implemented by Ankara in the weeks preceding the plane incident. A loud media fuss was made over the “massacres being carried out against the Turkmens” in Syria. For those familiar with Turkish state traditions, it was definitely not a fuss to be ignored. In Turkey, whenever there is a stir made over Turks or Turkmens being harmed (or being in harm's way) abroad, it always means that a military operation is soon to come. This is actually a strategy that's been in place since the 1950s, when the whole campaign aimed at raising awareness of Cyprus started. Likewise, we've seen the Turkmen population of northern Iraq used the same way that the Turkmens of Syria have now been used. And recalling the Sept. 6-7, 1955 pogrom, it was the same thing, with the Turkish population in Thessaloniki being used. In nearly all of these situations, there have been deep state operations.

In fact, I began to get suspicious about all the news being broadcast regarding massacres against Turkmens in Syria some time ago, which is why I wrote this on my Twitter account back on Nov. 20:

“When there is TURKMEN DRAMA news in Turkey, it means society is being prepared for something. They're going to put our military into Syria, which is why all the news about Turkmen Mountain is quite suspicious.”

Just four days after this tweet of mine, the Russian plane was brought down. It's clear now that Turks were being prepared for something like this. Which means, in this case, the bringing down of the Russian plane was not an act committed in the heat of the moment, but a planned operation.

But does this mean it's an operation Turkey carried out alone, or with the backing of a network of Western countries?

We see answers to this question in the statement made by Obama in the wake of the incident. While Obama warned both sides “not to increase the tension,” he only directly blamed Russia. He said that Russia claims to be bombing ISIL, but it is in fact bombing the opposition along the borders. The second half of this statement is crucial, as it marks the first time we've heard Obama mention Turkmen Mountain, in the north of Syria, and use protective language in talking about the groups there, while simultaneously blaming the Russians. But who are these groups that Obama is pushing to protect?

Well, there's al-Nusra, as well as Ahrar al-Sham and the Fatih brigades. Most of these are groups linked one way or another with al-Qaeda. The protective sort of rhetoric we're hearing from Obama with regard to these groups shows us that Turkey was not the main planner of this latest operation.

What's more, the near perfection of the messages given by Ankara to the global public the moment Turkey brought down the Russian jet show us that this was no last-minute operation, and that the scenario as a whole had been well thought out. Think about this: The plane goes down and immediately Ankara is able to show the entire world the maps showing the route flown by the plane. Then we hear the audio tapes of the Turkish pilots warning the Russian planes; the voices are so clear and audible, it's as though they had been taped in a studio beforehand. After this, we hear statements from Western pilots and soldiers -- in this case, American and Dutch -- noting that they, too, had clearly heard the Turkish pilots warning the Russian plane.

Clearly, it's all a well-rehearsed scenario. We've seen the downing of a Syrian helicopter and a plane in the past, not that long ago, but there was nothing like the map distribution and preparation of public opinion in advance we saw this time around.
For those who know the normal speed of Turkish bureaucracy, it's obvious that unless this scenario was prepared in advance, there's no way the statements we've already heard -- and the reactions we've already seen -- would have come in such a timely fashion.

So, in the end, all this data points to just one possible conclusion, as I mentioned at the start: Erdoğan has picked up a new contract. Let's hope he's able to carry it through successfully.

By Robert Parry

December 04, 2015 "Information Clearing House" - "Consortium News" -  Normally, when a country is hit by an act of terrorism, there is universal sympathy even if the country has engaged in actions that may have made it a target of the terrorists. After 9/11, for instance, any discussion of whether U.S. violent meddling in the Middle East may have precipitated the attack was ruled out of the public debate.

Similarly, the 7/7 attacks against London’s Underground in 2005 were not excused because the United Kingdom had joined in President George W. Bush’s aggressive war in Iraq. The same with the more recent terror strikes in Paris. No respectable politician or pundit gloated about the French getting what they deserved for their long history of imperialism in the Muslim world.

But a different set of rules apply to Russia. Along with other prominent Americans, President Barack Obama and New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman have expressed smug satisfaction over the murder of 224 people aboard a Russian charter flight blown up over the Sinai and in the slaying of a Russian pilot who had been shot down by a Turkish warplane and the killing of a Russian marine on a rescue mission.

Apparently, the political imperative to display disdain for Russian President Vladimir Putin trumps any normal sense of humanity. Both Obama on Tuesday and Friedman on Wednesday treated those Russian deaths at the hands of the Islamic State or other jihadists as Putin’s comeuppance for intervening against terrorist/jihadist gains in Syria.

At a news conference in Paris, Obama expressed his lack of sympathy as part of a bizarre comment in which he faulted Putin for somehow not turning around the Syrian conflict during the past month – when Obama and his allies have been floundering in their “war” against the Islamic State and its parent, Al Qaeda, for years, if not decades.

“The Russians now have been there for several weeks, over a month, and I think fair-minded reporters who looked at the situation would say that the situation hasn’t changed significantly,” Obama said. “In the interim, Russia has lost a commercial passenger jet.  You’ve seen another jet shot down. There have been losses in terms of Russian personnel.  And I think Mr. Putin understands that, with Afghanistan fresh in the memory, for him to simply get bogged down in a inconclusive and paralyzing civil conflict is not the outcome that he’s looking for.”

In examining that one paragraph, a “fair-minded” reporter could find a great deal to dispute. Indeed, the comments suggest that President Obama has crossed some line into either believing his own propaganda or thinking that everyone who listens to him is an idiot and will believe whatever he says.

But what was perhaps most disturbing was Obama’s graceless manner of discussing the tragedy of the Sinai bombing, followed by his seeming pleasure over Turkey shooting down a Russian SU-24 last week, leading to the killing of two Russian military men, one the pilot who was targeted while parachuting to the ground and the other a marine after his search-and-rescue helicopter was downed by a TOW missile.

Even more troubling, the key weapon systems used – the Turkish F-16 fighter jet and the TOW missile – were U.S.-manufactured and apparently U.S. supplied, in the case of the TOW missile either directly or indirectly to Sunni jihadists deemed “moderate” by the Obama administration.

The Ever-Smug Friedman

Columnist Friedman was equally unfeeling about the Russian deaths. In a column entitled “Putin’s Great Syrian Adventure,” Friedman offered a mocking assessment of Russia’s intervention against Sunni jihadists and terrorists seeking to take control of Syria.

While ridiculing anyone who praised Putin’s initiative or who just thought the Russian president was “crazy like a fox,” Friedman wrote: “Some of us thought he was just crazy.

“Well, two months later, let’s do the math: So far, Putin’s Syrian adventure has resulted in a Russian civilian airliner carrying 224 people being blown up, apparently by pro-ISIS militants in Sinai. Turkey shot down a Russian bomber after it strayed into Turkish territory. And then Syrian rebels killed one of the pilots as he parachuted to earth and one of the Russian marines sent to rescue him.”

Ha-ha, very funny! And, by the way, it has not been established that the Russian SU-24 did stray into Turkish air space but if it did, according to the Turkish account, it passed over a sliver of Turkish territory for all of 17 seconds.

The evidence is quite clear that the SU-24 was ambushed in a reckless act by Turkey’s autocratic President Recep Tayyip Erdogan who has been collaborating with Syrian and foreign jihadists for the past four years to overthrow Syria’s secular government. And the murder of the pilot after he bailed out of the plane is not some reason to smirk; it is a war crime.

Even uglier is the lack of any sympathy or outrage over the terrorist bombing that killed 224 innocent people, mostly tourists, aboard a Russian charter flight in Egypt. If the victims had been American and a similar callous reaction had come from President Putin and a columnist for a major Russian newspaper, one can only imagine the outrage. However, in Official Washington, any recognition of a common humanity with Russians makes you a “Moscow stooge.”

The other wacky part of both Obama’s comments and Friedman’s echoes of the same themes is this quick assessment that the Russian intervention in support of the Syrian government has been some abject failure – as if the U.S.-led coalition has been doing so wonderfully.

First, as a “fair-minded” reporter, I would say that it appears the Russian-backed Syrian offensive has at least stopped the advances of the Islamic State, Al Qaeda’s Nusra Front and its jihadist allies, including Ahrar al-Sham (which technically separates itself from Al Qaeda and thus qualifies for U.S.-supplied weaponry even though it fights side-by-side with Nusra in the Saudi-backed Army of Conquest).

The Afghan Memories

Obama’s reference to Afghanistan was also startling. He was suggesting that Putin should have learned a lesson from Moscow’s intervention in the 1980s in support of a secular, pro-Soviet regime in Kabul, which came under attack by CIA-organized-and-armed Islamic jihadists known then as mujahedeen.

Wielding sophisticated surface-to-air missiles and benefiting from $1 billion a year in Saudi-U.S.-supplied weapons, the Afghan fundamentalist mujahedeen and their allies, including Saudi Osama bin Laden, eventually drove Soviet troops out in 1989 and – several years later behind the Taliban – completed the reversion of Afghanistan back to the Seventh Century. Women in Kabul went from dressing any way they liked in public, including wearing mini-skirts, to being covered in chadors and kept at home.

Obama’s bringing up Afghanistan in the Syrian context and Putin’s supposed one-month Syrian failure was ironic in another way. After Al Qaeda’s 9/11 attacks, the United States invaded Afghanistan in pursuit of bin Laden and has been bogged down in a quagmire there for 14 years, including nearly seven years under Obama.

So, Obama may not be on the firmest ground when he suggests that Putin recall Moscow’s experience in Afghanistan a few decades ago. After all, Obama has many more recent memories.

Further, what is different about Putin’s Syrian strategy – compared with Obama’s – is that the Russians are targeting all the terrorists and jihadists, not just the Islamic State (also known as ISIS, ISIL or Daesh). While U.S. propaganda tries to present the non-ISIS jihadists as “moderates” (somehow pretending that Al Qaeda is no longer a terrorist organization), there is, in reality, very little distinction between ISIS and the alliance of Nusra/Ahrar al-Sham.

And, as for Official Washington’s new “group think” about the Syrian government’s lack of progress in the war, there is the discordant news that the last of rebel forces have agreed to abandon the central city of Homs, which had been dubbed the “capital of the revolution.” The Associated Press reported on Tuesday that “thousands of insurgents will leave the last opposition-held neighborhood in” Homs, with the withdrawal beginning next week.

Al-Jazeera added the additional fact that the remaining 4,000 insurgents are “from al-Nusra Front, Ahrar al-Sham and the Free Syrian Army.” In other words, the “moderate” Free Syrian Army was operating in collusion with Al Qaeda’s affiliate and its major jihadist partner.

While it’s hard to get reliable up-to-date information from inside Syria, one intelligence source familiar with the military situation told me that the Syrian government offensive, backed by Iranian troops and Russian air power, had been surprisingly successful in putting the jihadists, including ISIS and Nusra, on the defensive, with additional gains around the key city of Aleppo.

The Belated Oil Bombings

Also, in the past week, Putin shamed Obama into joining in a bombing operation to destroy hundreds of trucks carrying ISIS oil to Turkey. Why that valuable business was allowed to continue during the U.S.-led war on ISIS since summer 2014 has not been adequately explained. It apparently was being protected by Turkish President Erdogan.

Another irony of Obama’s (and Friedman’s) critical assessment of Putin’s one-month military campaign came in Obama’s recounting of his meeting during the Paris climate summit with Erdogan. Obama said he was still appealing to Erdogan to close the Turkish-Syrian border although radical jihadists have been crossing it since the start of the Syrian civil war in 2011.

“With respect to Turkey, I have had repeated conversations with President Erdogan about the need to close the border between Turkey and Syria,” Obama said. “We’ve seen some serious progress on that front, but there are still some gaps.  In particular, there’s about 98 kilometers that are still used as a transit point for foreign fighters, ISIL shipping out fuel for sale that helps finance their terrorist activities.”

In other words, all these years into the conflict – and about 1½ years since Obama specifically targeted ISIS – Turkey has not closed its borders to prevent ISIS from reinforcing itself with foreign fighters and trafficking in illicit oil sales to fund its terror operations. One might suspect that Erdogan has no intention of really stopping the Sunni jihadists from ravaging Syria.

Erdogan still seems set on violent “regime change” in Syria after allowing his intelligence services to provide extensive help to ISIS, Al Qaeda’s Nusra and other extremists. The Russians claim that politically well-connected Turkish businessmen also have been profiting off the ISIS oil sales.

But Obama’s acknowledgement that he has not even been able to get NATO “ally” Turkey to seal its border and that ISIS still remains a potent fighting force makes a mockery of his mocking Putin for not “significantly” changing the situation on the ground in Syria in one month.

Obama also slid into propaganda speak when he blamed Assad for all the deaths that have occurred during the Syrian conflict. “I consider somebody who kills hundreds of thousands of his own people illegitimate,” Obama said.

But again Obama is applying double standards. For instance, he would not blame President George W. Bush for the hundreds of thousands (possibly more than a million) dead Iraqis, yet Bush was arguably more responsible for those deaths by launching an unprovoked invasion of Iraq than Assad was in battling a jihadist-led insurgency.

Plus, the death toll of Syrians, estimated to exceed a quarter million, includes many soldiers and police as well as armed jihadists. That does not excuse Assad or his regime for excessively heavy-handed tactics that have inflicted civilian casualties, but Obama and his predecessor both have plenty of innocent blood on their hands, too.

After watching Obama’s news conference, one perhaps can hope that he is just speaking out of multiple sides of his mouth as he is wont to do. Maybe, he’s playing his usual game of “above-the-table/below-the-table,” praising Erdogan above the table while chastising him below the table and disparaging Putin in public while cooperating with the Russian president in private.

Or maybe President Obama has simply lost touch with reality – and with common human decency.

“Our civilization,” Dr. Richard Oppenlander writes in “Food Choice and Sustainability, “displays a curious instinct when confronted with a problem related to overconsumption—we simply find a way to produce more of what it is we are consuming, instead of limiting or stopping that consumption.”

The global elites have no intention of interfering with the profits, or ending government subsidies, for the fossil fuel industry and the extraction industries. They will not curtail extraction or impose hefty carbon taxes to keep fossil fuels in the ground. They will not limit the overconsumption that is the engine of global capitalism. They act as if the greatest contributor of greenhouse gases—the animal agriculture industry—does not exist. They siphon off trillions of dollars and employ scientific and technical expertise—expertise that should be directed toward preparing for environmental catastrophe and investing in renewable energy—to wage endless wars in the Middle East. What they airily hold out as a distant solution to the crisis—wind turbines and solar panels—is, as the scientist James Lovelock says, the equivalent of 18th-century doctors attempting to cure serious diseases with leeches and mercury. And as the elites mouth platitudes about saving the climate they are shoving still another trade agreement, the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), down our throats. The TPP permits corporations to ignore nonbinding climate accords made at conferences such as the one in Paris, and it allows them, in secret trade tribunals, to defy environmental regulations imposed by individual states.

New technology—fracking, fuel-efficient vehicles or genetically modified food—is not about curbing overconsumption or conserving resources. It is about ensuring that consumption continues at unsustainable levels. Technological innovation, employed to build systems of greater and greater complexity, has fragmented society into cadres of specialists. The expertise of each of these specialists is limited to a small section of the elaborate technological, scientific and bureaucratic machinery that drives corporate capitalism forward—much as in the specialized bureaucratic machinery that defined the genocide carried out by the Nazis. These technocrats are part of the massive, unthinking hive that makes any system work, even a system of death. They lack the intellectual and moral capacity to question the doomsday machine spawned by global capitalism.  And they are in control.

Civilizations careening toward collapse create ever more complex structures, and more intricate specialization, to exploit diminishing resources. But eventually the resources are destroyed or exhausted. The systems and technologies designed to exploit these resources become useless. Economists call such a phenomenon the “Jevons paradox.” The result is systems collapse.

In the wake of collapses, as evidenced throughout history, societies fragment politically, culturally and socially. They become failed states, bleak and desolate outposts where law and order break down, and there is a mad and often violent scramble for the basic necessities of life. Barbarism reigns.

“Only the strong survive; the weak are victimized, robbed, and killed,” the anthropologist Joseph Tainter writes in “The Collapse of Complex Societies.” “There is fighting for food and fuel. Whatever central authority remains lacks the resources to reimpose order. Bands of pitiful, maimed survivors scavenge among the ruins of grandeur. Grass grows in the streets. There is no higher goal than survival.”

The elites, trained in business schools and managerial programs not to solve real problems but to maintain at any cost the systems of global capitalism, profit personally from the assault. They amass inconceivable sums of wealth while their victims, the underclasses around the globe, are thrust into increasing distress from global warming, poverty and societal breakdown. The apparatus of government, seized by this corporate cabal, is hostile to genuine change. It passes laws, as it did for Denton, Texas, after residents voted to outlaw fracking in their city, to overturn the ability of local communities to control their own resources. It persecutes dissidents, along with environmental and animal rights activists, who try to halt the insanity. The elites don’t work for us. They don’t work for the planet. They orchestrate the gaiacide. And they are well paid for it.

The Anthropocene Age—the age of humans, which has caused mass extinctions of plant and animal species and the pollution of the soil, air and oceans—is upon us. The pace of destruction is accelerating. Climate scientists say that sea levels, for example, are rising three times faster than predicted and that the Arctic ice is vanishing at rates that were unforeseen. “If carbon dioxide concentrations reach 550 ppm,” writes Clive Hamilton in “Requiem for a Species,” “after which emissions fell to zero, the global temperature would continue to rise for at least another century.” We have already passed 400 parts per million, a figure not seen on earth for 3 million to 5 million years. We are on track to reach at least 550 ppm by 2100.

The breakdown of the planet, many predict, will be nonlinear, meaning that various systems that sustain life—as Tainter chronicles in his study of collapsed civilizations—will disintegrate simultaneously. The infrastructures that distribute food, supply our energy, ensure our security, produce and transport our baffling array of products, and maintain law and order will crumble at once. It won’t be much fun: Soaring temperatures. Submerged island states and coastal cities. Mass migrations. Species extinction. Monster storms. Droughts. Famines. Declining crop yields. And a security and surveillance apparatus, along with militarized police, that will employ harsher and harsher methods to cope with the chaos. 

We have to let go of our relentless positivism, our absurd mania for hope, and face the bleakness of reality before us. To resist means to acknowledge that we are living in a world already heavily damaged by global warming. It means refusing to participate in the destruction of the planet. It means noncooperation with authority. It means defying in every way possible consumer capitalism, militarism and imperialism. It means adjusting our lifestyle, including what we eat, to thwart the forces bent upon our annihilation.

The animal agriculture industry has, in a staggering act of near total censorship, managed to stifle public discussion about the industry’s complicity in global warming. It is barely mentioned in climate summits. Yet livestock and their byproducts, as Kip Andersen and Keegan Kuhn point out in their book, “The Sustainability Secret,” and their documentary, “Cowspiracy,” account for at least 32,000 million tons of carbon dioxide (CO₂) per year, or 51 percent of all worldwide greenhouse gas emissions. Methane and nitrous oxide are rarely mentioned in climate talks, although those two greenhouse gases are, as the authors point out, respectively, 86 times and 296 times more destructive than carbon dioxide. Cattle, worldwide, they write, produce 150 billion gallons of methane daily. And 65 percent of the nitrous oxide produced by human-related activities is caused by the animal agriculture industry. Water used in fracking, they write, ranges from 70 billion to 140 billion gallons annually. Animal agriculture water consumption, the book notes, ranges from 34 trillion to 76 trillion gallons annually. Raising animals for human consumption takes up to 45 percent of the planet’s land. Ninety-one percent of the deforestation of the Amazon rain forest and up to 80 percent of global rain forest loss are caused by clearing land for the grazing of livestock and growing feed crops for meat and dairy animals. As more and more rain forest disappears, the planet loses one of its primary means to safely sequester carbon dioxide. The animal agriculture industry is, as Andersen and Kuhn write, also a principal cause of species extinction and the creation of more than 95,000 square miles of nitrogen-flooded dead zones in the oceans.

A person who eats a vegan diet, they point out, a diet free of meat, dairy and eggs, saves 1,100 gallons of water, 45 pounds of grain, 30 square feet of forested land, 20 pounds CO₂ equivalent, and one animal’s life every day.

The animal agriculture industry has pushed through “Ag-Gag” laws in many states that criminalize protests, critiques of the industry, and whistleblowing attempts to bring the public’s attention to the staggering destruction wrought on the environment by the business of raising 70 billion land animals every year worldwide to be exploited and consumed by humans. And they have done so, I presume, because defying the animal agriculture industry is as easy as deciding not to put animal products—which have tremendous, scientifically proven health risks—into your mouth.

We have little time left. Those who are despoiling the earth do so for personal gain, believing they can use their privilege to escape the fate that will befall the human species. We may not be able to stop the assault. But we can refuse to abet it. The idols of power and greed, as the biblical prophets warned us, threaten to doom the human race.

Timothy Pachirat recounts in his book, “Every Twelve Seconds: Industrialized Slaughter and the Politics of Sight,” an Aug. 5, 2004, story in the Omaha World-Herald. An “old-timer” who lived five miles from the Omaha slaughterhouses recalled the wind carrying the stench of the almost six and a half million cattle, sheep and hogs killed each year in south Omaha. The sickly odor permeated buildings throughout the area.

“It was the smell of money,” the old-timer said. “It was the smell of money.”

Chris Hedges previously spent nearly two decades as a foreign correspondent in Central America, the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans. He has reported from more than 50 countries and has worked for The Christian Science Monitor, National Public Radio, The Dallas Morning News and The New York Times, for which he was a foreign correspondent for 15 years.

My sorrow goes out to those murdered and traumatized in Paris, and to the people and societies that feel such sorrow that they carry out these atrocities. First and foremost breathe and reflect: it is absolutely vital that we don’t panic and hastily and reflexively retaliate. Secondly, think of how we as a human family have gotten to the point where suicide bombers feel justified going on a murder spree through Central Paris, or the rich anonymously wage drone based terrorism on the poor causing such a worldview to fester. And lastly, seek to understand how abrupt climate change, ecological decline, and over-population have exacerbated ancient divides, escalating lethal militancy on all sides that threatens to tear down our one shared biosphere.

Liberal democracies must not let Western liberties by further sacrificed because of the madness of murderous thugs. While devastating, keep things in perspective, understanding far more children needlessly die from bad water a day – at least 3,000 – than were killed in the recent attack.

The cycle of escalation in the Middle East must be broken by responding firmly and resolutely with love and compassion, as both the murderous Daesh apostasy and Western imperialist neo-colonialism are eliminated from the Earth. The direct perpetuators and supporters of all murderous acts must be resolutely brought to justice under international law, the West must commit to basic human rights and needs for all (while not committing further war crimes), and ISIS must be liquidated as peaceful political structures are fostered in the Middle East.

War is murder. Together we must resist all religious, military, and nationalist indoctrination that teaches killing others is just. War murders are in service only to evil.

Seek to understand how we got to this point. The Middle East has been wracked by religious conflict for millennia. This volatile situation has been greatly exacerbated by profound inequity and injustice enforced by a medieval theocracy, funded by the West’s addiction to oil, and maintained through decades of aerial bombardment. The end result is that globally the very ecosystems and climate that we all depend upon for sustenance are collapsing. For many there are no homes or habitable ecosystems to return to post conflict.

Has America gotten revenge for 9/11 yet? Fifteen years after 9/11 over a million people have been murdered, the majority of them innocents. At some point we must recognize terrorism as blowback for Western over-consumption and the presumption that we are entitled to a disproportionate share of the world’s resources, including oil, which we are free to pillage to the detriment of all others. Daesh is a creation of failed foreign policy that came to a head with the botched invasion of Iraq by President George W. Bush, and continues with President Barack Obama’s murderous and ineffective drone strikes and persistent bombings.

Oil is a drug and it is utterly destroying both the sellers and users. The current state of oil inflamed perma-war must draw to an end.

The once lush Middle East is collapsing ecologically as human numbers and prolonged war have devastated natural ecosystems. Ancient cultures based upon an outdated medieval worldview have grown corpulent and corrupt by selling drugs to the over-developed west, and spewing fossil fuel filth into the atmosphere; devastating their own land and water bases already under pressure from exponential population growth, as they foul the global atmosphere. The current war and refugee crises in Syria and Iraq are a direct result of climate change and ecosystem loss, and are a portend of coming biosphere collapse.

The West’s middle class will never again enjoy the artificial bounty of liquidating natural ecosystems and a fossil fuel binge as traditional societies are plundered with impunity. Nor will the one billion people that live on less than $1.50 a day have the potential to achieve the over-consumptive lifestyles seen in the media and TV. Most fossil fuels are going to have to remain in the ground, and natural ecosystems protected and aided to expand, if we are to maintain the life-giving environment.

In an ecologically collapsing world strewn with stray nukes and millions of conventional weapons of war, we meet somewhere in the middle, or we die at each other’s throats as we pull down the biosphere and being ends.

Perhaps if we act quickly there are enough ecosystems and resources for all to meet basic needs, with many having some but not all luxuries, as a livable and peaceful world is maintained. But it requires sharing and knowing the meaning of the word enough. No longer can a few hundred people control half the Earth’s wealth, while billions exist in debilitating and radicalizing abject poverty. This creation of a just and equitable economic order is in all our interests, except perhaps for a handful of billionaire tyrants that throttle the Earth and all her life for a bit more growth in opulent excess.

Instead of appealing to international law and extolling the rights of man (that is, the self-evident political and economic rights of all people), America’s knee-jerk response to Islamo-terrorism has been to incessantly wage bi-partisan war upon entire societies – profoundly terrorizing whole regions for the crimes of a few with a constant threat of remote control murder. Americans feel a deep sense of entitlement to consume more at the expense of others, and to kill those that resist. There is little exceptionalism to be found in the now twisted American dream of wealth based upon the wretched despair of others. Even our token non-military foreign aid is reviled and subject to elimination by the rich.

Be clear: Daesh is a murderous twisted ideology that must be wiped from the Earth. Yet so is neo-imperialistic perma-war waged by the Congressional-military-industrial complex and the oil oligarchies of the world to maintain a couple percentage points of economic growth at the expense of the poor and the Earth. Drones and continual aerial bombings are no way to defeat evil, as indiscriminate murder fosters and emboldens a rotten worldview that threatens a regional and global dark age. Even “boots on the ground” will prove inadequate in and of itself to defeat an ideology based upon an ancient religion metastasizing into a barbaric cult in a sea of despair and collapsing ecosystems.

The only path forward is for the West to re-embrace its pre-9/11 commitment to international law, justice, and human rights; and for moderate elements in the Middle East to commit to a program of political and social renewal. The initial conflict in Syria, Egypt, Tunisia and Libya came from such a yearning – enlightened Middle-Eastern people power shedding centuries of tyranny and demanding justice, peace, and equity – a very real hope that persists in the hearts of many, a hope which vile Islamo-fascist murders seek to kill as well.

This hope of a modern, liberal, free, just and equitable Middle East fades ever further from reality as each foreign power – Russia, Iran, Turkey, America, France and others – in turn joins the Syrian and Iraqi bombing campaign; without much focus upon human development and well-being, environmental sustainability, or protecting democratic political reform from murderous extremists.

A righteous response to murderous evil is a shared global commitment to personal freedom, economic advancement, and environmental sustainability. A worldview of green liberty trumps the apocalyptic tyranny of both Islamo and Christo fascists. Water systems, schools, sustainable agriculture, eliminating emissions, restoring ecosystems, population controls (primarily through primary education of girls and birth control), and community based enterprise must be the focus. Together we must stabilize and reconstruct just, equitable, and sustainable societies in the Middle East and at home.

If war it must be, then the focus must be upon policing to destroy the Islamo-fascists without further war crimes by the West. The Western response to Islamo-terrorism has been to wage a new brand of token remote control terror, terrorizing whole societies and radicalizing entire generations. Not only can this not succeed, it continually breeds justifiable resentment and the next waves of terrorism. Particularly when couched in Christo-fascist language of superiority and entitlement.

To be successful, any military campaign should be waged under the auspices of the United Nations and be under the purview of international law and jurisdiction of the International Court of Justice. To be just, war must assiduously avoid civilian deaths, and understand the historical and ecological context of what is occurring, as a struggle seeks to bring peace, justice, and a full military demobilization by all sides.

Yet, be equally clear, a worldview as pernicious and vile as ISIS must be as thoroughly renounced and destroyed as Nazism or the KKK. A generous response based primarily upon love must seek to completely destroy a rotten ideology which threatens complete subjugation of all that is truthful and good. This will primarily be accomplished through mutual aid and a profound respect for human dignity. Yet entire societies may need to be occupied and reordered as this ideology is expunged. If you do invade, do so in force, and commit to fully eliminating evil ISIS and restoring a sense of normalcy through a complete program of reconstruction which may take decades.

Syria has been ravaged by abrupt climate change and terrestrial ecosystem collapse. Its overpopulated landscape is strewn with the detritus of war, and abject poverty which is the norm and from which there is no easy recovery. It is critical that we avoid allowing ecological scarcity to escalate into such madness elsewhere.

We must understand that in an over-populated, abrupt climate change ravaged, ecosystem collapsing world, streams of refugees interlaced with a small set of murderous madmen will be the new norm. This will require international policing that intervenes as criminal thugs indiscriminately pillage and murder, and for refugees to be housed as close to home as possible, to return home swiftly post conflict, as war once again becomes illegal and standing militaries disband.

Let a Paris climate treaty be the symbol of international unity as impacts of a further spread of abrupt climate change and globally collapsing environments are minimized. The ultimate revenge against the oil oligarchy destroying the world through greed and ecocide – as the conditions for desperate terrorism are fostered– will be for the world to come together in Paris and immediately begin emissions reductions. Escalating global conflicts can only be resolved by averting abrupt climate change as humanity comes together to equitably and justly set a framework to achieve global ecological sustainability.

Paris must not become the symbol of yet another military escalation that does not understand and respond to Muslim rage wisely and rationally by getting at root causes of mind-numbing despair.

Have no doubt: war is murder and is illegal. In a resource constrained Earth full of weapons there can be no respite unless our response is one based on love, compassion, and a shared way of life based upon freedom and being green. All sides must be reflective, yet we cannot allow further Western militarism or Islamo-terrorism. We must defeat the former at the ballot, and the latter in the war of ideas. Failure to defeat both means the back and forth of terrorist attacks will continue as a state of perma-war is the precursor to global ecological collapse.

Europe’s borders are going to have to be closed. As I have written, there is no way the entire population of dispossessed persons can be accommodated in Europe and the United States. It will only worsen the situation of already industrially collapsing over-developed societies where fascist demagoguery is on the rise. The west must power down its engines of ecocide as the not-yet-overdeveloped world improves their living standards, until the world converges in a place of just and equitable sustainability.

The alternative to global convergence is the bad sort of anarchy prior to complete social, economic, and ecological collapse. While those that are smart and hard workers will still have more, all will have enough; and peace, fairness, and sustainable livelihoods will reign.

Further, again, it is absolutely essential to commit to permaculture and ecological restoration of denuded lands. It is vital to demonstrate that secular humanism can meet the needs of an over-populated region in place, not by allowing indiscriminate migration that overruns any sense of hope that we can all persist by living within the ecological constraints of our own bioregions. And leave Islamic and Christian holy lands alone, as we seek to nurture free thinking and a disbelief in mythical absent gods that want us to kill each other.

Be strong. Don’t lash out indiscriminately with violence. If policing is required, do it together as a human family under the banner of truth, compassion, and international law; addressing religious fanaticism, injustice, ecological collapse, endless desires and greed on a finite Earth, and inequity amongst scarcity, as the root causes of perma-war waged by both sides.

True peace requires rebuking religious fanaticism, ending ecocidal fossil fuels, and making love not war. I reckon Paris has a thing or two to teach us about making love. Let's together make peace and sustainability the legacy of the Paris attacks, enshrined in a Paris climate treaty this coming month.

Dr. Glen Barry has written Earth Meanders essays for over a decade. He intends to do so more frequently and seeks your financial support at http://www.climateark.org/shared/donate/ and opportunities to syndicate and otherwise publish these deep ecology and green liberty writings.

In an attempt to find answers let us take an unusual route by beginning with a short story published in the year 1839 by the American author, Edgar Allen Poe, under the title; “The Fall of the House of Usher.” It depicts a tale of the end of a dynasty; in this case that of the House of Usher.

The story is also about physical, biological and mental decay; as expressed both in a worn and crumbling Castle and the lives of those inside. It ends with the last male survivor, Roderick Usher, succumbing to death in a struggle with the “grim phantasm, FEAR” as he is forced to “abandon life and reason together.” After his death, his friend – and the narrator, flees across a bridge over a tarn separating the castle from the open land around it. Looking back, the friend observes a crack in the castle wall open to the point where the entire castle then caves in upon itself. The story ends with the words: “my brain reeled as I saw the mighty walls rushing asunder.”

This tale brings to the fore questions we should all be asking about our planet and ourselves: Is Poe’s description of that castle a metaphor for the state of Planet Earth today? Is our castle – as Roderick Usher’s was, about to crash down upon us? And are we as a society any different from the character in Poe’s story who found himself defenseless; overcome by the “grim phantasm, FEAR”?

To answer these questions, we must take a long hard look at the underlying cause of our own planetary as well as socio-economic dysfunction. We need to understand the similarities between Poe’s Usher story and our own story.

To begin, we need to go back to the beginning of our Industrial Revolution. There we will find the material cause of our problem, the widening crack in our wall. We need to examine the validity of the capital market system that grew out of that revolution. We are that system, that system is us. It is a system that we have accepted as having socially inherent value. In many ways it has become our religious belief system.

Something has gone terribly wrong with that system. The architecture that grew out of the Industrial Revolution on which free and open capital markets today justify their value to society and find their “raison d’etre" is shaking under its own weight. It is about to bring humanity down with it.

All around us are signs of its failure; from the unbridled exploitation of the toxic tar sands in Canada, to the despoiling of the earth by way of open-pit mining, to the increasing CO2 in the biosphere, to the acidification and pollution of the oceans, to the rapid extinguishment of many forms of life on the planet. And the failure extends well beyond these few observations. Planet earth is telling us something. It is pointing to its rejection of our capital market economic system in its present form.

In the beginning of the industrial revolution capital markets were too small to make much of a difference. Their unfettered operation helped bring material prosperity to the world. Now they have grown to a size where they are energizing ecologically and socially destructive forces of a magnitude that has never before been seen in the history of the planet. As a result, resource allocation is being misguided and misappropriated on a massive scale. Irreparable planetary damage is being done. Fingers can be pointed in many directions for this; human greed, political dysfunction, just plain stupidity, however, the rules under which capital markets have been operating since they took form must take primary blame

Humanity is crying out for an entirely new form of economic/monetary theory. Social/political/Religious theory must necessarily be a part. A response is coming from some enlightened intellectuals in the world community; however, there is at present no universal consensus, nor are there long term solutions at hand.

How much time do we have to come up with a revised system? Our species remains in a mental gridlock. Some highly accredited physical scientists say our present trajectory of biosphere destruction will present very serious planetary problems within the next fifty years and they even point to the end of our species after three hundred.

We need to recognize that unless we can change the way we price what we desire to consume, the crack in our wall will continue to widen and the day will come when the wall will fall. Pricing carbon to reflect negative external cost can be a first step.

The forthcoming Paris agreements notwithstanding, wherever one looks there is nothing on the drawing board that will eliminate carbon as the primary source of energy world-wide. Pledges given at prior meetings have not been sufficient to guarantee that CO2 will be held at 400 ppm. There is no guarantee other agreements will hold. The 500 ppm threshold is now a certainty.

A growing sense of unease about CO2 emissions is, however, building throughout the world. Very large numbers of individuals, “scientific” and “nonscientific,” are coming to the realization that global action to avert the inevitability of irreversible change in planetary temperatures must be taken. Many are coming to the conclusion that we will soon pass a threshold beyond which accelerated global warming will become irreversible. Sparked by this awareness; there is the realization that within the next decade, unless immediate and drastic action is taken, human civilization will soon be facing very hard choices.

Country-by-country it is becoming clear that “adaptation” arising out of separate limitation agreements is too weak an idea. Holding average global temperature levels to 2 C (3.6 F) above pre-industrial levels under such agreements is seen as unrealistic. Science based observations are pointing to the conclusion that without an immediate change in energy sourcing we are heading for a rise beyond that 2 C marker to about 5 C. (9 F) At that level parts of the planet will become uninhabitable for humans. Also; at that level uncontrollable Methane gas will be released.

The result: Ocean rises before the end of this century will displace a quarter or more of the world’s population, with the first to suffer being the hundreds of millions who now live within three feet of sea level. At the same time, many of the world’s major cities will be inundated.

Throughout the planet this spells a grim future for Homo sapiens as well as many other life forms. Massive starvation leading to uncontrollable migration pressure will occur. Societal disruption – as we now see in the Middle East today – will be leading to global military conflict of immeasurable proportion.

For the billions at the bottom of the pyramid, incomprehension of this future can be excused. In the case of the Middle East, Africa and many other parts of the planet, it is compounded by low education levels, religious belief (comfort by way of Deity) and exponential population growth arising from the tradition of large family size. There is an irony here. Their progeny will be the first to suffer.

This incomprehension also extends into the upper levels of world society. For these individuals there is no excuse. Many are associated with the carbon industry - at all levels of involvement. Individually these carbon beneficiaries are responsible for the endangerment of all life forms on the planet. This also extends to many of the “privileged” at the top of the world economic pyramid. With their private jets and yachts and mountain and ocean-side homes, life is too good to care.

There is, however, some good news. A methodology that could become a final solution – being vociferously resisted by most of the above, is now beginning to elicit world attention and response.

By factoring negative external cost into every originating carbon based energy related trade both domestically and internationally; over a ten year period carbon would be eliminated as a world-wide energy source. This could be accomplished within the established framework of the world capital market carbon trading system. It is the only way that buyers can be made to recognize the actual external cost of what that they are purchasing and consuming.

This approach is congruent with the functioning of our existing capital market system. We need not do away with this system (As Communism attempted to do); rather, we can take advantage of it by placing it under our control. By factoring negative external cost into every originating carbon-based energy related trade, the greater built-in cost would become a part of the cost of production up and down the line and add to final price. (No national internal subsidies allowed)

Given the fact that carbon in its various forms is today traded on a world-wide basis, this can be accomplished nation by nation through an international body similar the ones that have formed since the end of World War II.

As noted above, powerful groups are preventing this from happening. In opposition is the political power of the carbon industry and those industries feeding off of that industry. After all, firms such as Exxon, BP and Halliburton will be severely affected; individuals like the Kotch brothers and the Saudi Princes too. Many oil rich nations will collapse; Russia for one. Texas oil wells will stop operation. Fracking will cease.

Revenues based on negative external cost can be used to meet present and future global needs arising from the planetary damage being done. Also, they can be used to assist nations in making economic/social adjustments. Immediate examples are a number of Island civilizations in the Pacific being inundated – populations will have to be resettled - and many countries in the Middle East now dependent on oil revenues to sustain their population by way of food imports. Given the fact that we have already reached the 400 ppm break point and are headed for 500 ppm, these future costs will be staggering. Funding must begin now.

This pricing methodology will force markets throughout the world to turn to carbon free sources of energy. As they adjust, high carbon input products will leave the market and be replaced by products with low or no carbon input. Other carbon free technologies will then become competitive.

Countries that do not join in by taxing internal carbon production should have their exports to compliant countries taxed by way of import duties in recognition of unmet negative external cost. Internationally algorithmic agreed upon formulae established by compliant countries can serve this purpose.

Before us is the most serious threat humans have ever faced. In terms of planetary and human pain and suffering it has the equivalency of a large scale atomic war. A body constituted like the UN or World Bank must come forward. There is no time to waste. The initiative has to be global. Military muscle may have to be employed or at least threatened against those nations that conspire to avoid the system.

The future of human civilizational is at stake. Carbon pricing on a level here described can be the first step in implementing changes in our capital market system built on a reconstituted human civilizational ethic that recognizes negative externalities throughout the marketplace.

For over one million years before the present age we were nurtured and sustained by our planet. We now find ourselves outside of this million plus year interdependency with nowhere to go.

Whatever meaning we as human beings are to have in the cosmos over time is now being tested. This capital market change is a way to begin to extricate ourselves from our dilemma and to transition our society into the New Age to come.

David Anderson brings together a wide range of interests in his writings, namely; theology, history, evolutionary anthropology, philosophy, geopolitics, and economics.

He has written three books. A fourth titled “Our Planetary Challenge - Moving Beyond a Fast Approaching Critical Fork in Our Evolutionary Road” is near completion. (see http://www.inquiryabraham.com/new-book.html ) It is about a necessary geo political, social, religious, economic paradigm shift for human survival.

David is a graduate of Dartmouth College and the University of Hawaii (Harvard Asia Pacific) Advanced Management Program. Over a thirty year career he was an international risk manager and senior executive at several of America's premier multinational institutions.

The Paris Climate Change Conference aims for international consensus on actions to keep global warming to less than 2 degrees C, but has betrayed humanity before it even began. Thus science informs that the internationally-agreed 2 degree C temperature target is both catastrophic and inevitable. Pre-conference national greenhouse gas (GHG) pollution reduction commitments to Paris imply a plus 2.7 degrees C temperature rise. Indeed the present circa plus 0.9 degree C temperature rise is already catastrophic for populations in low-lying island and megadelta locations.

This massive public deception has come about because of Mainstream journalist, politician and academic lying by commission and lying by omission. As an indignant, 5-decade-career Australian scientist who is appalled by the worsening climate emergency,  I have written a Memo (below) about  this massive deception to the ABC (the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Australia's equivalent of the UK BBC) that has been copied to Australian  media, MPs,  and climate change activists. The Silence has been Deafening – indeed  a record 60,000 people attended the People's Climate Change March in the heart of Melbourne on Friday 27 November (the first  of numerous such massive pre-Paris marches around the world except in Paris where war criminal and climate criminal President Hollande has banned any climate march and put climate activists under house arrest) but a Search of the ABC News for “climate change march” has revealed no reportage of this massive event.

Letter to ABC journalists.  

Dear ABC journalist,  All of us but particularly  young people and future generations will be betrayed by the forthcoming 2015 Paris Climate Change Conference. I have sent a detailed memo (below)  to the ABC that is a fact sheet re pre-Paris People's Climate Marches against the War on Terra that is also a War on the Young and Future Generations and their fundamental human right to a decent life in an undegraded  environment. This betrayal has been facilitated by malreportage by Mainstream media and by the taxpayer-funded ABC in particular. Yours sincerely, Dr Gideon Polya [contact details]

Memo to ABC: fact sheet re pre-Paris People's Climate Marches against War on Terra.

Perhaps  200,000 people will attend the People's Climate March in Melbourne, Australia  (5.30pm, Friday 27 November, State Library) [in fact a record 60,000 people attended this climate change  rally] impelled by the worsening climate emergency due to the climate criminal War on Terra. Similar climate marches will be held around Australia and the world on 27-29 November, just before the 2015 Paris Climate Change Conference. Listed below are crucial, Elephant in the Room, climate change realities which are nevertheless effectively  ignored by Mainstream media and the taxpayer-funded ABC (Australia's equivalent of the UK BBC):

1. Temperature rise target. The internationally-agreed 2 degree C temperature target is catastrophic and inevitable; international commitments to Paris imply plus 2.7C; the present circa plus 0.9C is already catastrophic for low-lying island and megadelta locations. The Paris Climate Change Conference has failed before  it has started, but while it is  too late to avoid a catastrophic plus 2C temperature rise we must all do whatever we can to make the future less bad for our children and future generations.

2. Terminal carbon pollution budget. Direst estimates (involving methanogenic livestock impacts and a methane Global Warming Potential  relative to CO2 of 105 on a 20 year time frame and with aerosol impacts considered)  are that the world will exceed in 3 years its Terminal Carbon Pollution Budget of 600 Gt CO2-e that must not be exceeded for a 75% chance of avoiding a catastrophic plus 2C temperature  rise; Australia's  huge Domestic plus Exported greenhouse  gas (GHG) pollution means it exceeded its fair share of this Terminal Carbon Pollution Budget in 2011  and its huge Domestic GHG pollution means it exceeded its fair share in 2013. Australia's minimum offer to the  Paris Climate Change Conference of “26% off 2005 GHG pollution  by 2030” is dishonest because it actually means that Australia's expected Domestic plus Exported GHG pollution in 2030 will be 164% of that in 2005.

3. Carbon fuel burning-related deaths. 7 million people die from air pollution each year, this including 10,000 Australian deaths from pollutants from carbon fuel burning and 75,000 people dying from the burning of Australian coal exports. Translating the latest London (UK) pollution-related mortality data to urban Australia would indicate  about 20,000 urban Australian deaths annually from air pollution involving fine carbon particulates and NO2.

4. Carbon debt.  Assuming a damage-related Carbon Price in USD of $200 per tonne CO2-e,  the World has a Carbon Debt of $360 trillion that is increasing at $13 trillion per year,  and Australia has a Carbon Debt of $7.5 trillion that is increasing at $400 billion per year and at $40,000 per head per year for under-30 year old Australians – climate injustice, climate inequity, intergenerational injustice, intergenerational inequity and unconscionable subsidies  for deadly carbon fuel burning.

5. Climate change deaths & climate genocide. About 0.5 million people die from climate change annually in a world in which 17 million people die annually from deprivation. However the direst estimates of only 0.5 billion surviving unaddressed climate change this century translates to a climate genocide of 10 billion people and an average of 100 million such deaths annually  this century.  As a world leader in annual per capita GHG pollution and climate change inaction, Australia is disproportionately  contributing  to a worsening climate genocide in island states and megadelta states.

6. Safe atmospheric CO2 target 300 ppm CO2. Many climate scientists, biologists and science-informed  climate activists demand that for a safe planet  for all peoples and all species, we must rapidly  return  to the pre-Industrial Revolution  atmospheric  CO2 concentration of  about 300 parts per million carbon dioxide (300 ppm CO2) from the present damaging and dangerous 400 ppm CO2 that is presently increasing at about 2.0-2.5 ppm CO2 per year. The cost of doing this via the cheapest route (generation of biochar or carbon from anaerobic pyrolysis of cellulosic biomass) is similar to the global carbon debt.

7. Methane bomb.  Natural gas is mostly methane (CH4) which leaks and has a Global Warming Potential (GWP)  relative to CO2 of 105 on a 20 year time frame and with aerosol impacts considered. A 2.6% gas leakage will have the same global warming effect as burning the remaining  97.6% to generate CO2. Leakage from fracking could reach circa 10%. Depending upon the degree of leakage, burning gas for power could be dirtier  GHG-wise than burning coal. A coal-to-gas transition is disastrous. A re-assessment of the  impact  of methanogenic livestock production revised annual global GHG pollution upwards to 64 Gt CO2-e per year from a previous 42 Gt CO2-e per year,  with livestock contributing over 51% of the higher figure. The 50 Gt CH4 predicted to be released from  the East Siberian Arctic Shelf in coming decades is equivalent to 50 billion tonnes CH4 x 105 tonnes  CO2-equivalent/tonne CH4 = 5,250 tonnes CO2-e or about nine (9) times more than the world's terminal greenhouse gas (GHG) pollution budget of 600 Gt CO2-e. We are doomed unless we can stop this Arctic CH4 release. 

8. Required actions. There must be urgent reduction of atmospheric CO2 to a safe level of about 300 ppm CO2 via a rapid  switch to the best non-carbon and renewable energy (solar, wind, geothermal, wave, tide and hydro options that are currently roughly the same market price as and about 4 times lower in actual true cost than obscenely-subsidized coal burning-based power) and to energy efficiency, public transport, needs-based production, re-afforestation and return of carbon as biochar to soils coupled with correspondingly rapid cessation of fossil fuel burning, deforestation, methanogenic livestock production and population growth. Renewable energy is vastly cheaper than the true cost of fossil fuel burning-based power and rapid implementation of 100% renewable energy by 2020 and rapid cessation of carbon pollution has been adopted by a variety of  towns, cities, states, corporations and countries.  

9. Overall nuclear cycle is dirty GHG-wise & food for biofuel has huge carbon debt.  In a carbon economy the overall nuclear cycle -  from digging up, transporting and processing uranium ore to disposing of radioactive waste and decommissioning  power plants - generates CO2. When we necessarily have to shift to lower quality uranium ores the overall nuclear cycle CO2 production  from a  nuclear power station could be the same as from a gas-fired power station. Hugely  increased efficiency of use of limited uranium reserves can be obtained using  fast-breeder reactors but the resultant plutonium economy would be extraordinarily dangerous from plutonium chemical toxicity and nuclear weapons  perspectives,  with horrendous associated diminution of civil rights and  human rights. The use of plant-derived sugar, starch or oil for generating biofuel requires expensive purification of ethanol or biodiesel, can carry a huge carbon debt and is an obscene use of food for fuel in a world in which 2 billion already have insufficient  food  and food insecurity is increasing. Indeed meat from grain-fed livestock is an increasingly unacceptable option in a hungry world.  A temperature increase of 1C can decrease subtropical wheat yield by 10%.  

10. Carbon price and divestment from fossil fuels. As cogently stated by scientifically-trained Green Left Pope Francis in his 2015 Encyclical  “Laudatum si'”, the human and environmental cost of burning fossil fuels must be “fully borne” by the polluters .  Permitting fossil fuel exploiters to pollute the one common atmosphere and ocean of all peoples for free is climate criminal theft, and the consequent damage will have to be reversed by future generations (climate injustice, climate inequity, intergenerational injustice, intergenerational inequity). The true cost of coal burning for power taking environmental and human impacts into account can be 4 times greater  than the present highly-subsidized market price. The cap-and-trade Emission Trading Scheme (ETS) approach has been condemned by numerous experts because it is empirically ineffective, is accordingly counterproductive, will enable dishonest market manipulation  and is fraudulent in that it involves a government unilaterally selling licences to pollute the one common atmosphere and ocean of all countries. The anti-science, anti-environment, pro-coal, pro-gas, pro-fossil fuels Australian Coalition (COALition) Government's Direct Action policy absurdly pays polluters to pollute less and is thus precisely akin to paying  thieves to steal less. A “fully borne” Carbon Price has the corollary of divestment from exploitation of fossil fuel reserves that are now increasingly  seen as stranded assets.

11. Climate criminality and Boycotts, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS). Australia has 0.3% of the world's population but its annual  Domestic  plus Exported GHG pollution is 3% of the world's total GHG pollution. Currently about 0.5 million people die from climate change each year and 7 million die from air pollution. At some point,  increasing climate genocide will elicit actions from affected countries, including  Green Tariffs, Green Bans, International  Court of Justice (ICJ) litigations, International Criminal Court (ICC ) prosecutions, and Boycotts, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) against all those people, politicians, parties, companies, corporations, and  countries   disproportionately polluting the one common atmosphere and ocean of all people and thus disproportionately harming and threatening  Humanity and the Biosphere with climate genocide, speciescide, ecocide, omnicide and terracide. The first actual climate genocides will be the adumbrated disappearance  of Island States such as Kiribati and Tuvalu. Any species is unique and priceless but the species extinction rate is now 100-1,000 times  greater than normal.

12. Personal responsibility and actions. What can decent people do in the War on Terra? What can you tell your grandchildren that you did in the War on Terra? Decent people can personally and collectively minimize their personal carbon footprint but must also (a) inform everyone they can; (b) urge and apply Boycotts, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) against  all people, politicians, parties, companies, corporations, and  countries   disproportionately polluting the one common atmosphere and ocean of all people; and (c) vote for pro-environment, Green representatives – in Australia that means that they should vote 1 Green and put the COALition last. I suggest a three-fold ABC strategy involving (A) Accountability (holding the individual, corporate or national climate criminals responsible by intra-national and international sanctions, boycotts, civil actions and criminal prosecutions); (B) a Badge (e.g. wearing a Badge such as “300 ppm CO2”, the atmospheric CO2 target advocated by 300.org); and (C) a Credo (e.g. that of 300.org: “There must be a safe and sustainable existence for all peoples and all species on our warming-threatened Planet and this requires a rapid reduction of atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration to about 300 parts per million”.

Dr Gideon Polya, Melbourne.

PS For a version of this memo with detailed referencing documentation  see “Memo to ABC: fact sheet re Pre-Paris People's Climate Marches against War on Terra”, Gideon Polya Writing, 2015-11-26: https://sites.google.com/site/gideonpolyawriting/2015-11-26 .

Dr Gideon Polya has been teaching science students at a major Australian university for 4 decades. He published some 130 works in a 5 decade scientific career, most recently a huge pharmacological reference text "Biochemical Targets of Plant Bioactive Compounds" (CRC Press/Taylor & Francis, New York & London , 2003). He has published “Body Count. Global avoidable mortality since 1950” (G.M. Polya, Melbourne, 2007: http://globalbodycount.blogspot.com/ ); see also his contributions “Australian complicity in Iraq mass mortality” in “Lies, Deep Fries & Statistics” (edited by Robyn Williams, ABC Books, Sydney, 2007: http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/ockhamsrazor/australian-complicity-in-iraq-mass-mortality/3369002#transcript

) and “Ongoing Palestinian Genocide” in “The Plight of the Palestinians (edited by William Cook, Palgrave Macmillan, London, 2010: http://mwcnews.net/focus/analysis/4047-the-plight-of-the-palestinians.html ). He has published a revised and updated 2008 version of his 1998 book “Jane Austen and the Black Hole of British History” (see: http://janeaustenand.blogspot.com/ ) as biofuel-, globalization- and climate-driven global food price increases threaten a greater famine catastrophe than the man-made famine in British-ruled India that killed 6-7 million Indians in the “forgotten” World War 2 Bengal Famine (see recent BBC broadcast involving Dr Polya, Economics Nobel Laureate Professor Amartya Sen and others: http://www.open.edu/openlearn/history-the-arts/history/social-economic-history/listen-the-bengal-famine ). When words fail one can say it in pictures - for images of Gideon Polya's huge paintings for the Planet, Peace, Mother and Child see: http://sites.google.com/site/artforpeaceplanetmotherchild/ and http://www.flickr.com/photos/gideonpolya/ . 

The video in this post is the first in a series of videos on a new YouTube Channel – War in Ukraine – the Unreported Truth. The purpose of the videos is to give the people of Donbass an English voice so they can be heard beyond Donbass.

Most channels that exist either are in Russian and and do not even have subtitles, or at best have subtitles. This new channel puts things about the conflict in context and is in English with Russian subtitles. People in the US don’t seem to care about Bandera, but they also know virtually nothing that is happening there. However, they would be upset if the President of the United States appointed their Governors. This is one of many issues that War in Ukraine – the Unreported Truth bring to light.

Alexander Chopov, who started the channel, has a double major in International Affairs and Political Science from George Washington University, interned in US Congress, has a Political Science PhD from Diplomatic Academy of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Russia. He has lived in US for over 10 years, and understands both American mentality and politics.

It is hoped that this new channel helps the people of the West to relate to the people in Donbass. The people in Donbass are just like the people in the West. They are fighting for their future against oppression!

The United Nations climate change summit commenced this past Monday with 150 heads of state and tens of thousands of representatives from national governments, businesses and the NGO industry converging on Paris. Despite its supposedly historic significance, the 21st Conference of Parties, or COP 21, promises little more than the previous 20 failed annual conferences.

Regardless of whether a final agreement is reached, the most ambitious scenario demonstrates once again the inability to address climate change in any meaningful way under capitalism.

The centerpiece of negotiations in Paris consists of formalizing voluntary commitments to limit carbon pollution by individual countries made over the past several months. Yet even if every pledge is fully enacted, with all national sources honestly accounted for, global emissions would remain on a trajectory to increase global temperatures relative to pre-industrial levels by an average of 2.7C by century’s end. During the 2009 climate conference in Copenhagen, national governments resolved to remain below the 2 degree threshold, beyond which scientists caution catastrophic impacts are possible.

The agreement under discussion in Paris, however, would not legally require any country to actually achieve their targets. Instead, the most that is acceptable to the Obama administration and other major world leaders is a procedural obligation to pursue nonbinding goals. As economic or political conditions change, governments are free to revise or renege upon these commitments.

Nevertheless, politicians and pundits are playing up the summit as a potential turning point for climate change. “Never have the stakes on an international meeting been so high,” remarked French President Francois Holland in the opening plenary. German Chancellor Angela Merkel added, “Our very future as humankind hinges on this. ... Billions of people are pinning their hopes on what we achieve here in Paris.”

Notwithstanding the rhetoric, there is no denying that the expected agreement falls woefully short, even in its ambition, of what is scientifically necessary to protect humanity from the worst consequences of a warming planet. Justifications that such is the limit of what is “technically feasible” or “politically practical” only serve as an indictment of the economic and political setup.

The industrial capacity exists to transition to entirely renewable sources of energy within a matter of a few decades or less, as a recent study by Stanford researcher Mark Jacobson concluded for the United States. However, the level of planning and coordination on an international basis needed to implement such a transition comes into immediate conflict with the division of the world into rival nation-states and private ownership of the world’s productive resources.

The pledges put forward correspond to the needs of the banks and major transnational corporations. Some establish absolute carbon reductions, others merely slow “business as usual” growth, or carbon intensity per economic output. Cumulatively they allow for continued global growth of greenhouse gas emissions, reaching a level 26 percent higher in 2030 than in 2010. Industry remains free to shift energy-intensive production to the most profitable areas, factoring in the lowest fossil energy costs.

COP 21 has continued the trend of growing participation and influence of businesses. With more than 180 business events over the two weeks, the summit resembles a trade show as much as a negotiating session. Corporate leaders joined political leaders to urge “bold” action at Paris. We Mean Business, a coalition representing 350 companies with $8 trillion in revenues, “aspires to an international agreement that stimulates the private sector and makes it a partner with governments in implementing ambitious climate action,” according to a statement on their web site. Even several fossil fuel companies, including Shell and Total, have—publicly, at least—argued for a price to carbon.

Behind this growing role of big business at the conference is a drive among a section of supposedly forward-thinking companies to shape the outcome of international climate policy in a way that minimizes the risk to profits and even opens up avenues for new spoils. The summit is not only an advertising opportunity to tout their “green” credentials, but the serious business of ensuring that any agreement advances market-based climate policies. All that is external to the market (carbon dioxide emissions, unexploited tropical forests) is to be allocated at market value, to be bought and sold, manipulated and profited from.

While expectations are high for a deal to pass next week, it is by no means guaranteed. Disagreements are arising over the extent to which the national commitments will be enforceable, the value of climate-related foreign aid from wealthy to poor countries and intellectual property rights. In the first week of discussions, India emerged as the most prominent voice of dissent, criticizing a proposed system to monitor and revise country-specific emission targets every five years. Indian negotiators stressed the historic responsibility of industrialized countries for the climate crisis, in an attempt to win concessions for native business interests in the form of access to advanced technology and increased development funding.

However, underlying these often staged disputes are bitter conflicts that extend far beyond environmental issues. Behind the scenes, the spying, threats and bribes revealed by WikiLeaks at the Copenhagen climate summit is without question continuing. The primary concern of the major powers is to emerge from the climate talks in a strengthened position relative to its rivals.

Despite a bilateral deal on emission reduction commitments last year, tensions between the U.S. and China are beginning to surface at the climate talks, albeit in a muted form thus far. The remarks by Obama and Xi on the opening day alluded to these conflicts: Obama stressed the need to hold countries accountable for their pledges, while Xi highlighted the needs of developing countries to reduce poverty.

A recurring component of the annual climate summits has been vocal street protests and other direct action. Organizers planed another large series of demonstrations in Paris, but the Socialist Party government in France used the terror attacks to impose police state measures. President Hollande has maintained a ban on all demonstrations, rounding up those who disobey and placing organizers under house arrest. Under conditions of soaring class tensions, the French ruling class is compelled to outlaw any form of opposition.

The organizations behind the planned protests in no way represented a political challenge to the dictates of the corporate and financial elite or their ministers and diplomats assembled in Paris. The common aim of the myriad of liberal environmental and activist groups is to apply pressure on capitalist governments, acting as a counterweight to the profit interests of the fossil fuel industry. They fundamentally represent the interests of sections of the middle class, seeking to temper the worst excesses of capitalism, to carve out a more comfortable (and sustainable) existence within the current setup.

After 21 years of failed conferences and impotent protests, political lessons must be drawn. The task confronting masses of workers and youth, whose future hangs in the balance, is to fight for the reorganization of society on the basis of human need, not private profit. Complex international issues like climate change cannot be addressed on the basis of an outmoded division of the globe into rival states. Such a struggle cannot be successful if it is confined to the protest politics of the pseudo-left. Rather it must be based on the working class, as the only force capable of socializing production on an international scale.

"For me, COP21 is a pilgrimage of peace — to remember all the innocent victims of the wars against the land and people; to develop the capacity to reimagine that we are one and refuse to be divided by race and religion; to see the connections between ecological destruction, growing violence and wars that are engulfing our societies."

Humanity stands at a precipice. Merely 200 years of the age of fossil fuel has driven species and biodiversity to extinction, destroyed our soils, depleted and polluted our water and destabilised our entire climate system. Five hundred years of colonialism have driven cultures, languages, peoples to extinction and left a legacy of violence as the basis of production and governance.

The November 13 Paris attacks have led to an escalation of violence in our way of speaking and thinking while dealing with a conflict. Paris has emerged as the epicentre of the planetary ecological crisis and the global cultural crisis. From November 30 to December 11, movements and governments are converging in Paris for COP21 — 21st Conference of Parties on the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. COP21 is not just about climate change; it is about our modes of production and consumption which are destroying the ecosystems that support life on this planet.

There is a deep and intimate connection between the events of November 13 and the ecological devastation unleashed by the fossil fuel era of human history. The same processes that contribute to climate change also contribute towards growing violence amongst people. Both are results of a war against the Earth.

Industrial agriculture is a fossil fuel-based system which contributes more than 40 per cent of the greenhouse gases leading to climate change. Along with the globalised food system, industrial agriculture is to be blamed for at least 50 percent of the global warming.

Synthetic nitrogen fertilisers are based on fossil fuels and use the same chemical processes used to make explosives and ammunition. Manufacturing one kilogram of nitrogen fertiliser requires the energy equivalent to two litres of diesel. Energy used during fertiliser manufacture was equivalent to 191 billion litres of diesel in 2000 and is projected to rise to 277 billion in 2030. Synthetic fertiliser, used for industrial agriculture, is a major contributor to climate change — it starts destroying the planet long before it reaches a field. Yet the dominant narrative is that synthetic fertilisers feed us and without them people will starve. The fertiliser industry says that “they produce bread from air”. This is incorrect.

Nature and humans have evolved many non-violent, effective and sustainable ways to provide nitrogen to soil and plants. For example, pulses and beans are nitrogen-fixing crops. Bacteria named rhizobia, which exists in the nodules of their roots, converts atmospheric nitrogen into ammonia and then into organic compounds to be used by the plant for growth.

Intercropping or rotating pulses with cereals has been an ancient practice in India. We also use green manures which can fix nitrogen.

Returning organic matter to the soil builds up soil nitrogen. Organic farming can increase nitrogen content of soil between 44-144 per cent, depending on the crops that are grown. Organic farming not only avoids the emissions that come from industrial agriculture, it transforms carbon in the air through photosynthesis and builds it up in the soil, thus contributing to higher soil fertility, higher food production and nutrition and a sustainable, zero-cost technology for addressing climate change.

Ecologically non-sustainable models of agriculture, dependent on fossil fuels, have been imposed through “aid” and “development” projects in the name of Green Revolution. As soil and water are destroyed, ecosystems that produced food and supported livelihoods can no longer sustain societies. As a result, there’s anger, discontent, frustration, protests and conflicts. However, land, water and agriculture-related conflicts are repeatedly and deliberately mutated into religious conflicts to protect the militarised agriculture model, which has unleashed a global war against the earth and people.

I witnessed this in Punjab while I was doing research for my book, The Violence of the Green Revolution, on the violence of 1984. We are witnessing this today, as conflicts which begin because of land degradation and water crises — induced by non-sustainable farming systems — are given the colour of religious conflicts.

Since 2009, we heard of Boko Haram while we missed the news about the disappearance of Lake Chad. Lake Chad supported 30 million people in four countries — Nigeria, Chad, Cameroon and Niger. Intensive irrigation for industrial agriculture increased four-fold from 1983 to 1994. Fifty per cent of the disappearance of Lake Chad is attributed to the building of dams and intensive irrigation for industrial agriculture.

As the water disappeared, conflicts between Muslim pastoralists and settled Christian farmers over the dwindling water resources led to unrest. As Luc Gnacadja, the former secretary-general of the UN Convention to Combat Desertification, states about the violence in Nigeria, “The so-called religious fight is actually about access to vital resources”.

The story of Syria is similar. In 2009, a severe drought uprooted a million farmers who were forced to move into the city for livelihood. Structural adjustment measures, imposed by global financial institutions and trade rules, prevented the government from responding to the plight of Syria’s farmers. The farmers’ protests intensified. By 2011, the world’s military powers were in Syria, selling more arms and diverting the narrative from the story of the soil and farmers to religion. Today, half of Syria is in refugee camps, the war is escalating and the root causes of the violence continue to be actively disguised as religion.

Haber, the inventor of Zyklon B — a poisonous gas used in 1915 to kill more than a million Jews in concentration camps — was given a Nobel Prize in chemistry. American biologist Norman Borlaug received a Nobel Prize for Peace for the chemical-based Green Revolution that has only left a legacy of violence.

For me, COP21 is a pilgrimage of peace — to remember all the innocent victims of the wars against the land and people; to develop the capacity to reimagine that we are one and refuse to be divided by race and religion; to see the connections between ecological destruction, growing violence and wars that are engulfing our societies. We must remember that there will be no peace between people if we do not make peace with the Earth.

The much-vaunted COP21 negotiations in Paris are, despite the claims of world leaders, dead on arrival.

Emissions reductions targets are not up for discussion. Those pledges are already on the table, having been put forward voluntarily by each country.

Government negotiators in Paris are instead looking at banal details of how and when countries should commit to improving their voluntary pledges, and ensuring "transparency" and "accountability".

Catastrophe?

But current emissions pledges already guarantee disaster. A report by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCC) released in October calculated that: “Compared with the emission levels consistent with the least-cost 2 °C scenarios, aggregate GHG emission levels resulting from the INDCs [intended nationally determined contributions] are expected to be higher by 8.7 (4.7–13.0) Gt CO2 eq (19 percent, range 10–29 percent) in 2025 and by 15.1 (11.1–21.7) Gt CO2 eq (35 per cent, range 26–59 percent) in 2030.”

The targets set in stone before Paris, in other words, are already insufficient to avoid a global average temperature rise of 2 degrees Celsius – accepted by policymakers as the safe limit beyond which the planet enters the realm of dangerous climate change.

According to the UNFCC report, “much greater emission reductions effort than those associated with the INDCs will be required in the period after 2025 and 2030 to hold the temperature rise below 2 °C above pre-industrial levels.”

But pushing forward even more ambitious reductions for the post-2030 era is “not realistic anymore,” according to Tommi Ekholm, Senior Scientist at VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland, which has just undertaken a comprehensive analysis of emissions targets from 159 countries. “Therefore it is critically important to make the current emission targets for 2030 more ambitious.”

Writing in Nature four years ago, one team of scientists concluded that we could breach the two degree danger zone shortly after mid-century, after 2060.

Two decades to go

But the more scientists learn, the more they realise we keep underestimating the risks. Last year, an analysis in Scientific American by Professor Michael Mann of Pennsylvania State University explained that new research showed the two degree danger zone could be breached at our present rate of emissions within just 20 years.

This means limiting global atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) concentrations to around 405 parts per million (ppm).

Even this, Mann explained, is based on “a conservative definition of climate sensitivity that considers only the so-called fast feedbacks in the climate system, such as changes in clouds, water vapor and melting sea ice. Some climate scientists, including James E. Hansen, former head of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, say we must also consider slower feedbacks such as changes in the continental ice sheets.”

That implies that a safe level of atmospheric CO2 is actually less than 350 ppm.

“We are well on our way to surpassing these limits,” wrote Mann. “In 2013 atmospheric CO2 briefly reached 400 ppm for the first time in recorded history – and perhaps for the first time in millions of years, according to geologic evidence. To avoid breaching the 405-ppm threshold, fossil-fuel burning would essentially have to cease immediately.”

Terraforming the Earth

Teetering on the edge of the 400 ppm threshold as we are now may well already mean a “radically-altered” planet in the long-term, according to geoscientist Jeff Severinghaus of the Scripps Institute of Oceanography.

During the Pliocene between three and five million years ago, CO2 levels reached around 415 parts per million (ppm). At this time, global average temperatures were around 3-4 C higher, and sea levels between 16 and 131 feet higher than today.

An earlier UNFCC report summarising the conclusions of 70 scientific experts noted that avoiding dangerous climate change requires “a fundamental transformation of the energy system and global GHG emission levels towards zero by 2100.” The report emphasised:

“Limiting global warming to below 2C necessitates a radical transition (deep decarbonisation now and going forward), not merely a fine tuning of current trends.”

Yet deep carbonisation is not even being mentioned in Paris.

“One of the key things… that is not being discussed at the negotiations at all is to put a limit to fossil fuel extractions,” said Pablo Solon, former chief climate negotiator for the Bolivian government, and a former ambassador the UN. “There is not one single leader, one single country that has put text to be negotiated that says you have to leave 80 percent of fossil fuels under the ground. And if you don’t leave fossil fuels under the ground, how are you going to limit greenhouse gas emissions that come mainly from fossil fuel extraction?”

The accord will also not contain legally-binding provisions where it really counts: enforcing commitments to promised emissions reductions. Countries will be legally-bound to provide their targets. They just won’t be legally-bound to meet their target. This is so that as many countries as possible can be encouraged to sign up to what can be described as a “legally-binding” agreement – however toothless it might be in practice.

Militarising the planet

Meanwhile, as French authorities have exploited the draconian enhancement of anti-terror powers to ban the main climate rally, crackdown on smaller climate protests, and arrest and detain dozens of climate activists, Europe is rallying to participate in US-led coalition air strikes in Syria.

After 13/11, France accelerated its airstrikes on Islamic State (ISIS) targets in Syria, swiftly followed by Britain on Wednesday, and now Germany, which plans to send six Tornado jets and 1,200 troops to support coalition forces.

There is a cutting irony here. It’s now increasingly recognised that before the "Arab Spring", a cycle of droughts induced by climate change drove migrations of a million predominantly Sunni farmers in Syria into Alawite-dominated coastal cities.

The sudden influx strained sectarian tensions, and heightened pressure on a regime already suffering from flagging revenues due to declining oil exports and rocketing food prices. The latter were exacerbated as the years leading up to 2011 saw successive crop failures across major food basket regions, triggered by extreme weather events.

In May, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, published a scientific study concluded that climate change amplified Syria’s drought to record levels, catalysing civil unrest into a full-blown uprising.

In 2011, the West’s initial response was to hope that President Bashar al-Assad would be able to brutalise the uprisings into non-existence.

“My judgment is that Syria will move; Syria will change, as it embraces a legitimate relationship with the United States and the West and economic opportunity that comes with it and the participation that comes with it,” announced John Kerry, who had met Assad several times the preceding year.

Hillary Clinton described him as a “reformer”, even as his security forces repressed peaceful protests, encouraging him to escalate to shooting people in the streets.

Scoping Syrian fossil fuels

Which “economic opportunity” was Kerry talking about?

It is not widely known that US, British, French and Israeli oil companies have had a range of overlapping interests in exploiting Syria’s unconventional oil and gas resources, which are believed to be considerable.

A document for the Syrian Ministry of Petroleum reveals that just months before the uprising, British oil major Shell was about to “devise a master plan for the development of the gas sector in Syria, following an agreement signed with the Ministry of Petroleum. The agreement includes an assessment of the overall undiscovered gas potential in Syria, potential for upstream gas production, need for gas transmission and distribution networks…”

CGGVeritas, a firm backed by the French government, had conducted seismic surveys estimating Syria’s total offshore hydrocarbon potential to represent “billion-barrel/multi-TCF [trillion cubic feet]” levels. A study by the firm was published in 2011 by GeoArabia, a Bahrain-based petroleum industry journal sponsored by Chevron, ExxonMobil, Saudi Aramco, Shell, Total, and BP.

Total, another French major, also worked with Assad at this time.

More recently, another US firm with interests in Syria is Genie Oil and Gas, an Israeli subsidiary of which was granted a licence by the Israeli government in 2013 to explore the Syrian Golan Heights, which has been controlled by Israel since capturing the territory from Syria in 1967.

In early November, Prime Minister Netanyahu personally asked Barack Obama in a private meeting if Israel’s right to the Golan could be accepted by the US, to which the American president apparently said nothing.

Genie’s board consists of an interesting mix, including former former CIA director James Woolsey, Vice President Dick Cheney, global media baron Rupert Murdoch, Obama’s former economic advisor Larry Summers, and Obama’s nomimee for Secretary of Commerce Bill Richardson, among others.

“We want a new Syrian state including some of those who are fighting it helping on the ground,” said British defence secretary Michael Fallon.

No doubt, US, British, French and Israeli oil firms hope to be well positioned to take advantage of the “new Syrian state” in a post-conflict Syria.

This, however, will not even serve the deeply compromised climate accord to be ratified by their governments in Paris.

Dr. Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed is a bestselling author, award-winning investigative journalist, and noted international security scholar, as well as a policy expert, film maker, strategy and communications consultant, and change activist. His debut science fiction thriller novel, ZERO POINT, was released in August 2014. His previous non-fiction book was A User’s Guide to the Crisis of Civilization: And How to Save It (2010), which inspired the award-winning documentary feature film, The Crisis of Civilization (2011).

What do the Pyrenean ibex, St. Helena olive, Baiji dolphin, Liverpool pigeon, Eastern cougar, West African black rhinoceros, Formosan clouded leopard, Chinese Paddlefish, the Golden Toad and the Rockland grass skipper butterfly all have in common but which is different from the Dodo?

The answer is that these species all became extinct since the year 2000, that is, in the last fifteen years. The Dodo became extinct in 1662.

The one thing that all of these species have in common is that the cause of their extinction was human beings.

If you would like to watch a video which evocatively showcases some of the extinct species of planet Earth, you can do so here: 'Toll a bell on Remembrance Day for Lost Species 30th November 2015'. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xT1vp5HfBq4

The real tragedy is that the few species mentioned above do not begin to tell the story. Recent estimates indicate that 200 species of life (plants, birds, animals, fish, amphibians, insects, reptiles) are driven to extinction each day. Every day. This rate exceeds that during the last mass extinction event, when the dinosaurs vanished 65 million years ago.

In short, planet Earth is now experiencing its sixth mass extinction event and we are the cause. How so?

Well, human activity now impacts heavily all over the planet and we are using a variety of sophisticated industrial technologies to destroy other life forms in vast numbers and this inevitably results in the extinction of some species.

In some cases we simply hunt these life forms to extinction as a result of some misguided commerical imperative. Whether it is for food (such as whales and many species of fish), trophies (such as 'big game' animals), raw materials (such as the ivory of elephant tusks) or some delusional belief in their aphrodisiac or medicinal qualities (such as the horn of a rhinoceros), we kill them with sophisticated killing technologies such as harpoons, fishing nets and guns (against which they have no evolutionary defense). To give one example: sea turtles. Six out of the seven subspecies of sea turtles are endangered, according to Wildcoast. Why? 'Sea Turtles are threatened due to the poaching and hunting of their shells, meat and eggs. Turtle eggs are sold as a snack…with the absurd belief that they possess aphrodisiac elements.' See 'Sea Turtles'. http://www.wildcoast.net/programs/5-sea-turtles

But mainly, it is two things that drive species over the edge: our systematic destruction of land habitat – forests, grasslands, wetlands, peatlands, mangroves… – in our endless effort to capture more of the Earth's wild places for human use (whether it be residential, commercial, mining, farming or military) and our destruction of waterways and the ocean habitat by dumping into them radioactive contaminants, carbon dioxide, a multitude of poisons and chemical pollutants, and even plastic. There are now 'dead zones' in several oceans of the world, not to mention the great floating garbage patches.

Consider rainforests.

In an extensive academic study that was recently concluded, the more than 150 joint authors of the report advised that 'most of the world's >40,000 tropical tree species now qualify as globally threatened'. See 'Estimating the global conservation status of more than 15,000 Amazonian tree species'. http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/1/10/e1500936.full Why are more than 40,000 tropical tree species threatened with extinction? Because 'Upwards of 80,000 acres of rainforest are destroyed across the world each day, taking with them over 130 species of plants, animals and insects.' See 'Half of Amazon Tree Species Face Extinction'. http://www.discovery.com/dscovrd/nature/half-of-amazon-tree-species-face-extinction/

Or consider frogs.

Relatively speaking, we pay a lot of attention to big and colorful species but the species you have never heard about or which are less 'exotic' need to be valued too. Such as frogs which, among other invaluable services from a limited human perspective, eat malarial mosquitoes. 'Frogs have survived in more or less their current form for 250 million years, having survived countless ice ages, asteroid crashes, and other environmental disturbances, yet now one-third of amphibian species are on the verge of extinction.' See 'Save the Frogs!' http://www.savethefrogs.com/

But not all of our destruction is as visible as our vanishing rainforests and the iconic species that vanish with them. Have you thought about the Earth's soil recently? Apart from depleting it, for example, by washing it away (sometimes in dramatic mudslides but usually unobtrusively) because we have logged the rainforest that held it in place, we also dump vast quantities of both inorganic and organic pollutants into it as well. Some of the main toxic substances in waste are inorganic constituents such as heavy metals, including cadmium, chromium, lead, mercury, nickel and zinc. Mining and smelting activities and the spreading of metal-laden sewage sludge are the two main culprits responsible for the pollution of soils with heavy metals. See 'Soil-net'. http://www.soil-net.com/dev/page.cfm?pageid=secondary_threats_pollutants&loginas=anon_secondary

Far more common, however, is our destruction of the soil with organic based pollutants associated with industrial chemicals. Thousands of synthetic chemicals reach the soil by direct or indirect means, often in the form of fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides and other poisons that destroy the soil, by reducing the nutrients and killing the microbes, in which we grow our food. See, for example, 'Glyphosate effects on soil rhizosphere-associated bacterial communities'. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S004896971530989X

Using genetically modified organisms, and the chemical poisons on which they rely, exacerbate this problem terribly. But two other outcomes of the use of such poisons are that the depleted soil can no longer sequester carbon and the poisons also kill many of the beneficial insects, such as bees, that play a part in plant pollination and growth.

And, of course, military contamination and destruction of soil is prodigious ranging from the radioactive contamination of vast areas to the extensive and multifaceted chemical contamination that occurs at military bases.

Like destroying the oceans, destroying the soil is an ongoing investment in future extinctions.

Anyway, if so far you have been unconcerned about the fate of our fellow species, you would be wise to reconsider. If you haven't checked them lately, there are lists of critically endangered, endangered, vulnerable and near threatened species. But heading all of these lists, there should be one other: homo sapiens sapiens. With human extinction now possible by 2030 – see 'Why is Near Term Human Extinction Inevitable?' http://www.countercurrents.org/burrowes171214.htm – we do not have much time left to respond powerfully. Humans, as many ecologists have been noting for decades, are only one part of the web of life. Our fellow species make the Earth habitable. We cannot live here without them.

So the key question is not 'Do you really want to live in a world without elephants?' The key question is 'Do you really want to live?'

If you do, then you need to act. At the simplest level, you can make some difficult but valuable personal choices. Like becoming a vegan or vegetarian, buying/growing organic/biodynamic food, and resolutely refusing to use any form of poison. But if you want to take an integrated approach, the biggest impact you can have as an individual is to systematically reduce your own personal 'ecological footprint' in consideration of our fellow species.

If you wish to consider such an approach, you are welcome to ponder joining those participating in 'The Flame Tree Project to Save Life on Earth' http://tinyurl.com/flametree which outlines an easy series of steps for reducing your consumption in seven key resource areas by 10% per year for 15 successive years while simultaneously building your self-reliance. You can also consider signing the online pledge of 'The People's Charter to Create a Nonviolent World' http://thepeoplesnonviolencecharter.wordpress.com which obviously includes nonviolence towards our fellow species.

In addition, you can participate in ongoing campaigns by a multitude of organizations that campaign to preserve one or more threatened species from extinction. If we can save enough other species, we might just save ourselves.

Extinction might be howling outside our door but we don't have to cower waiting for someone else to save us. What you do personally makes a vital difference.

And here's one final thought. Four billion years ago there was no life on Earth. Then, in what can only be described as a miracle (and you can decide your own preference about the nature of that miracle), a single cell came to life. Perhaps this miracle was then repeated in subsequent years.

But however and how often it occurred, every living organism since that time, including every organism that lives today, is linked in an unbroken chain with that first living cell (or those first living cells). Four billion years of evolution which includes you as a unique individual.

There may be life elsewhere in the Universe. But it does exist here, on Earth. And it has had time to evolve to a complexity that includes us.

Until we understand, as Gandhi understood, that all life is one, we live disconnected from the most fundamental truth of our existence. If we kill something else, we kill a part of our self.

Robert J. Burrowes has a lifetime commitment to understanding and ending human violence. He has done extensive research since 1966 in an effort to understand why human beings are violent and has been a nonviolent activist since 1981. He is the author of 'Why Violence?' http://tinyurl.com/whyviolence His email address is flametree@riseup.net and his website is at http://robertjburrowes.wordpress.com

The first week of the U.N. climate talks in Paris, or COP21, has culminated in delegates coming to an agreement on the draft text of the international climate agreement, a 48-page blueprint that ministers will review and hopefully finalize into a comprehensive agreement by the time the conference ends on December 11.

The final agreement, they hope, will keep the increase in the Earth's surface temperature to a maximum of 2° Celsius, the level the scientific community believes must not be crossed in order to avoid the worst impacts of climate change.

BBC News environment correspondent Mark McGrath reported that many of the delegates were "relieved that they had at least reached this point, as it marks a critical point after four years of negotiations."

Following the draft's adoption, South Africa's negotiator Nozipho Mxakato-Diseko, speaking on behalf of more than 130 developing nations, said, "In the words of Nelson Mandela, it always seems impossible until it is done." His statement was received with loud applause.

"Nothing has been decided and nothing will be left behind," said French climate ambassador Laurence Tubiana. "This text marks the will of all to reach an agreement." But, she warned, "We are not at the end of the route. Major political issues are yet to be resolved."

The document, which offers ministers several options regarding the agreement's ultimate long-term goal, is still far from what must be accomplished at the landmark summit. Several critical issues remain. First, delegates have not agreed on the scale or timeline of reducing greenhouse gas emissions, which trap the sun's heat on the earth's surface, thereby increasing the global mean temperature. Second, it is unclear which nations should shoulder the brunt of the reductions. And third, it remains unclear how the changes recommended by the agreement will be financed and which nations should pay.

"We now need to summon the political will needed to make the hard decisions required for an effective and durable agreement that protects the most vulnerable among us," said Thoriq Ibrahim of the Maldives, who is chair of the Alliance of Small Island States.

Analysts said the key to the agreement is a quinquennial (or five-year) review that allows for nations to strengthen their commitments; what has been called a “ratcheting-up mechanism.” But for the plan to work, the world must move toward a low-carbon economy. For poorer nations, that means money to finance the costly shift to renewable energy technologies and help deal with ongoing impacts of a warming world, such as heat waves, droughts, floods, wildfires, extreme weather, rising sea level, ocean acidification and biodiversity loss. These climate-related effects are causing sudden shifts in local economies and food security across the world, including agriculture, subsistence farming and fishing.

Under the planned Paris accord, rich nations would be required to move hundreds of billions of dollars to developing nations by 2020.

"Perhaps this is the most exciting time in human history," said actor and environmentalist Sean Penn at a special event at the conference. "Those illusions of having too many difficult choices have always created chaos. Now we live in a time where there are no choices. We have certainty. The days of dreams have given way to the days of doing."

Penn has been working with French environment minister Segolene Royal to restore Haiti, with France funding the actor's major new environmental initiative, Haiti Takes Root, which aims to help the island following the 2010 earthquake, improve soil quality and promote sustainable forestry and renewable energy. After visiting with Royal in Paris in October, Penn said he was optimistic about COP21. But while negotiators remain confident they can avoid the failure of the 2009 U.N. climate talks in Copenhagen, there has been strong criticism of the new draft document, particularly its bias toward rich nations.

Tamar Lawrence-Samuel, associate research director at Corporate Accountability International, a Boston-based non-profit working to end abuse by transnational corporations, said the following in an emailed statement:

While the draft outcome released this morning for negotiation next week will likely be met with applause by Global North governments and their corporate board room backers, it fails to deliver meaningfully toward the systemic transition climate change requires. At the core of this failure are the obstinate negotiating positions of the U.S. and other Global North governments who are bent on deregulating the global rules applying to them and advancing the financial needs of big business over the survival needs of people.

And, despite the image of hope and action President Obama and other leaders painted on Monday, the chasm between rhetoric and action continues to grow. Whether it’s finance or technology, loss and damage or differentiation, the positions reflected in this text are heavily biased towards the U.S., Japan, EU and other Global North countries, and the emissions-intensive industries they represent.

The U.S. position, for example, reflects the strong limits placed on U.S. climate action by a Congress overrun by the unconstrained campaign spending of Koch Industries, Exxon Mobil and other big polluters. As a result, President Obama has said the United States can’t accept a legally binding agreement and is failing to come forward with any new commitments on important issues like finance, technology and capacity.

Rather than advancing the interests of polluters through a weaker climate policy regime this agreement must recognize the historical responsibility of the Global North, provide justice for the Global South and catalyze the rapid transition away from dirty energy. The primary obstacle to these and other policy imperatives is to insulate the policymaking process from the corrosive influence of big polluters, both here at the UNFCCC and at home in national governments. Only then will climate policy truly value people over profits.

Poorer nations, particularly low-lying coastal and island nations that are most at risk for becoming submerged under a rising sea level, prefer the agreement to embrace the much more difficult target of 1.5° Celsius. That target would require the global economy to become fully powered by renewable energy sources by 2050. A study by the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory found that the U.S. can generate 80 percent of its electricity from renewable energy by 2050, using available technology. But that remains a fantasy as long as renewable energy continues to be economically disadvantaged in favor of fossil fuel: In 2013, according to the International Institute for Sustainable Development, consumer subsidies to fossil fuels totaled $548 billion, compared to only $121 billion for renewables.

Worryingly, COP21 is hampered by an unprecedented level of corporate sponsorship. “Inviting some of the world’s biggest polluters to pay for the COP is akin to hiring a fox to guard a hen house,” said Patti Lynn, executive director of Corporate Accountability International. “We must eliminate this conflict of interest before COPs become corporate trade shows for false market-based solutions.”

The World Wide Fund for Nature, an international non-governmental organization promoting conservation and biodiversity, stresses that climate change "will impact some of the world's poorest and most vulnerable people, disrupting food production, and threatening vitally important species, habitats and ecosystems."

But as long as the rich nations—and their big polluters—dictate the terms of the Paris accord, maintain unhealthy fossil fuel subsidies and refuse to establish a long-term market for renewable energy that includes putting a price on carbon emissions, a world that protects more vulnerable nations, humans, animals and plants from the impacts of climate change will remain a dream. The science is clear: Unchecked climate change will be devastating for humanity and our fellow species. Two weeks of meetings seems hardly enough time to achieve a meaningful climate agreement with actionable goals that are legally binding. It is highly unlikely that the final accord will please everybody. Hopefully, at the very least, it will move the needle in the right direction.

Tasneem Essop, former provincial minister of environment for Western Cape, South Africa, who is now working on WWF’s Global Climate Deal Network Initiative, said, "We're hoping that in the rush to the end, ministers do not trade ambition for expediency, and remain true to the science."

For six centuries or more, history was, above all, the story of the great game of empires. From the time the first wooden ships mounted with cannons left Europe’s shores, they began to compete for global power and control.  Three, four, even five empires, rising and falling, on an increasingly commandeered and colonized planet. The story, as usually told, is a tale of concentration and of destruction until, in the wake of the second great bloodletting of the twentieth century, there were just two imperial powers left standing: the United States and the Soviet Union. Where the other empires, European and Japanese, had been, little remained but the dead, rubble, refugees, and scenes that today would be associated only with a place like Syria.

The result was the ultimate imperial stand-off that we called the Cold War. The two great empires still in existence duked it out for supremacy on “the peripheries” of the planet and “in the shadows.” Because the conflicts being fought were distant indeed, at least from Washington, and because (despite threats) both powers refrained from using nuclear weapons, these were termed “limited wars.” They did not, however, seem limited to the Koreans or Vietnamese whose homes and lives were swept up in them, resulting as they did in more rubble, more refugees, and the deaths of millions.

Those two rivals, one a giant, land-based, contiguous imperial entity and the other a distinctly non-traditional empire of military bases, were so enormous and so unlike previous “great powers” -- they were, after all, capable of what had once been left to the gods, quite literally destroying every habitable spot on the planet -- that they were given a new moniker. They were “superpowers.”

And then, of course, that six-century process of rivalry and consolidation was over and there was only one: the “sole superpower.” That was 1991 when the Soviet Union suddenly imploded. At age 71, it disappeared from the face of the Earth, and history, at least as some then imagined it, was briefly said to be over.

The Shatter Effect

There was another story lurking beneath the tale of imperial concentration, and it was a tale of imperial fragmentation. It began, perhaps, with the American Revolution and the armed establishment of a new country free of its British king and colonial overlord. In the twentieth century, the movement to “decolonize” the planet gained remarkable strength. From the Dutch East Indies to French Indochina, the British Raj to European colonies across Africa and the Middle East, “independence” was in the air. Liberation movements were launched or strengthened, guerrillas took up arms, and insurgencies spread across what came to be called the Third World. Imperial power collapsed or ceded control, often after bloody struggles and, for a while, the results looked glorious indeed: the coming of freedom and national independence to nation after nation (even if many of those newly liberated peoples found themselves under the thumbs of autocrats, dictators, or repressive communist regimes).

That this was a tale of global fragmentation was not, at first, particularly apparent. It should be by now. After all, those insurgent armies, the tactics of guerrilla warfare, and the urge for “liberation” are today the property not of left-wing national liberation movements but of Islamic terror outfits. Think of them as the armed grandchildren of decolonization and who wouldn’t agree that theirs is a story of the fragmentation of whole regions. It seems, in fact, that they can only thrive in places that have, in some fashion, already been shattered and are failed states, or are on the verge of becoming so. (All of this, naturally, comes with a distinct helping hand from the planet’s last empire).

That their global brand is fragmentation should be evident enough now that, in Paris, Libya, Yemen, and other places yet to be named, they’re exporting that product in a big way. In a long-distance fashion, they may, for instance, be helping to turn Europe into a set of splinterlands, aborting the last great attempt at an epic tale of concentration, the turning of the European Union into a United States of Europe.

When it comes to fragmentation, the last empire and the first terror caliphate have much in common and may in some sense even be in league with each other. In the twenty-first century, both have proven to be machines for the fracturing of the Greater Middle East and increasingly Africa. And let’s never forget that, without the last empire, the first caliphate of terror would never have been born.

Both have extended their power to shake whole societies by wielding advanced technology in forward-looking ways. Two American administrations have employed remote-controlled drones to target terror leaders and their followers across the Greater Middle East and Africa, causing much “collateral damage” and creating a sense of constant fear and terror among those in the backlands of the planet whom drone pilots refer to as potential “bugsplat.” In its robotic manhunting efforts Washington continues to engage in a war on terror that functionally promotes both terror and terror outfits.

The Islamic State has similarly used remote-controlled technology -- in their case, social media in its various forms -- to promote terror and stoke fear in distant lands. And of course they have their own low-tech version of Washington’s drones: their suicide bombers and suicidal killers who can be directed at distant individual targets and are engines for collateral damage. In other words, while the U.S. is focused on remote-controlled counterinsurgency, the Islamic State has been promoting a remarkably effective version of remote-controlled insurgency. In tandem, the effect of the two has been devastating.

Planet of the Imperial Apocalypse

Between those epic tales of concentration and fragmentation lies history as we’ve known it in these last centuries. But it turns out that, unsuspected until relatively recently, a third tale lurked behind the other two, one not yet fully written that could prove to be the actual end of history. Everything else -- the rise and fall of empires, the power to suppress and the urge to revolt, dictatorship and democracy -- remains the normal stuff of history. Prospectively, this is the deal-breaker.

It promises a concentration of power of a sort never before imagined and fragmentation of a similarly inconceivable kind. At this moment when the leaders of just about all the nations on Earth have been in Paris working out a deal to rein in greenhouse gas emissions and slow the heating of the planet, what else could I be speaking of than Emperor Weather? Think of his future realm, should it ever come to be, as the planet of the imperial apocalypse.

In the last imperial age, the two superpowers made “end times” a human possession for the first time in history. The U.S. and then the USSR took the super power of the atom and built nuclear arsenals capable of destroying the planet several times over. (These days, even a relatively modest exchange of such weapons between India and Pakistan might plunge the world into a version of nuclear winter in which a billion people might die of hunger.) And yet while an instant apocalypse loomed, a slow-motion version of the same, also human-made, was approaching, unrecognized by anyone. That is, of course, what the Paris Summit is all about: what the exploitation of fossil fuels has been doing to this planet.

Keep in mind that since the industrial revolution we’ve already warmed the Earth by about 1 degree Celsius. Climate scientists have generally suggested that, if temperatures rise above 2 degrees Celsius, a potentially devastating set of changes could occur in our environment. Some climate scientists, however, believe that even a 2-degree rise would prove devastating to human life. In either case, even if the Paris pledges from 183 nations to cut back on greenhouse gas emissions are agreed upon and carried out, they would only limit the rise in global temperatures to between an estimated 2.7 and 3.7 degrees Celsius. If no agreement is reached or little of it is actually carried out, the rise could be in the 5-degree range, which would be devastating. Over the coming decades, this could indeed give Emperor Weather his global realm.

Of course, his air power -- his bombers, jets, and drones -- would be superstorms; his invading armies would be mega-droughts and mega-floods; and his navy, with the total or partial melting of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, would be the rising seas of the planet, which would rob humanity of its coastlines and many of its great cities. His forces would occupy not just one or two countries in the Greater Middle East or elsewhere, but the entire planet, lock, stock, and barrel.

Emperor Weather’s imperial realms would be global on an awe-inspiring scale and the assaults of his forces would fragment the present planet in ways that could make much of it, in human terms, look like Syria. Moreover, given how long it takes greenhouse gases to leave the atmosphere, his global rule would be guaranteed to last an inhumanly long period of time unchallenged.

Heat (think burning Australia today, only far worse) would be the coin of the realm. While humanity will undoubtedly survive in some fashion, whether human civilization as we now know it can similarly survive on a planet that is no longer the welcoming home that it has been these last thousands of years we have no way of knowing.

Keep in mind, though, that like history itself, this is a story we are still writing -- even though Emperor Weather couldn't care less about writing, history, or us. If he truly comes to power, history will certainly end in some sense. There will be no hope of democracy under his rule because he won’t care a whit about what we think or do or say, nor of revolt -- that staple of our history -- because (to adapt something Bill McKibben has long pointed out) you can’t revolt against physics.

This story is not yet engraved in... well, if not stone, then melting ice. Sooner or later, it may indeed be a tale unfolding in environmental feedback loops that can no longer be stopped or altered. But for the moment, it seems, humanity still has the chance to write its own history in a fashion that would allow for a perhaps less welcoming but still reasonably palatable world for our children and grandchildren to live in. And be glad of that.

For that to happen, however, successful negotiations in Paris can only be the start of something far more sweeping when it comes to the forms of energy we use and how we live on this planet. Fortunately, experiments are underway in the world of alternative energy, funding is beginning to appear, and a global environmental movement is expanding and could someday, on a planet growing ever less comfortable, put the heat on governments globally before Emperor Weather can turn up the heat on history.

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Book, Nick Turse’s Tomorrow’s Battlefield: U.S. Proxy Wars and Secret Ops in Africa, and Tom Engelhardt's latest book, Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World.

Copyright 2015 Tom Engelhardt

© 2015 TomDispatch. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176077/

Tom Engelhardt is a co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author of The United States of Fear as well as a history of the Cold War, The End of Victory Culture. He is a fellow of the Nation Institute and runs TomDispatch.com. His latest book is Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World.

The charade of the 21st United Nations climate summit will end, as past climate summits have ended, with lofty rhetoric and ineffectual cosmetic reforms. Since the first summit more than 20 years ago, carbon dioxide emissions have soared. Placing faith in our political and economic elites, who have mastered the arts of duplicity and propaganda on behalf of corporate power, is the triumph of hope over experience. There are only a few ways left to deal honestly with climate change: sustained civil disobedience that disrupts the machinery of exploitation; preparing for the inevitable dislocations and catastrophes that will come from irreversible rising temperatures; and cutting our personal carbon footprints, which means drastically reducing our consumption, particularly of animal products.

“Our civilization,” Dr. Richard Oppenlander writes in “Food Choice and Sustainability,” “displays a curious instinct when confronted with a problem related to overconsumption—we simply find a way to produce more of what it is we are consuming, instead of limiting or stopping that consumption.”

The global elites have no intention of interfering with the profits, or ending government subsidies, for the fossil fuel industry and the extraction industries. They will not curtail extraction or impose hefty carbon taxes to keep fossil fuels in the ground. They will not limit the overconsumption that is the engine of global capitalism. They act as if the greatest contributor of greenhouse gases—the animal agriculture industry—does not exist. They siphon off trillions of dollars and employ scientific and technical expertise—expertise that should be directed toward preparing for environmental catastrophe and investing in renewable energy—to wage endless wars in the Middle East. What they airily hold out as a distant solution to the crisis—wind turbines and solar panels—is, as the scientist James Lovelock says, the equivalent of 18th-century doctors attempting to cure serious diseases with leeches and mercury. And as the elites mouth platitudes about saving the climate they are shoving still another trade agreement, the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), down our throats. The TPP permits corporations to ignore nonbinding climate accords made at conferences such as the one in Paris, and it allows them, in secret trade tribunals, to defy environmental regulations imposed by individual states.

New technology—fracking, fuel-efficient vehicles or genetically modified food—is not about curbing overconsumption or conserving resources. It is about ensuring that consumption continues at unsustainable levels. Technological innovation, employed to build systems of greater and greater complexity, has fragmented society into cadres of specialists. The expertise of each of these specialists is limited to a small section of the elaborate technological, scientific and bureaucratic machinery that drives corporate capitalism forward—much as in the specialized bureaucratic machinery that defined the genocide carried out by the Nazis. These technocrats are part of the massive, unthinking hive that makes any system work, even a system of death. They lack the intellectual and moral capacity to question the doomsday machine spawned by global capitalism.  And they are in control.

Civilizations careening toward collapse create ever more complex structures, and more intricate specialization, to exploit diminishing resources. But eventually the resources are destroyed or exhausted. The systems and technologies designed to exploit these resources become useless. Economists call such a phenomenon the “Jevons paradox.” The result is systems collapse.

In the wake of collapses, as evidenced throughout history, societies fragment politically, culturally and socially. They become failed states, bleak and desolate outposts where law and order break down, and there is a mad and often violent scramble for the basic necessities of life. Barbarism reigns.

“Only the strong survive; the weak are victimized, robbed, and killed,” the anthropologist Joseph Tainter writes in “The Collapse of Complex Societies.” “There is fighting for food and fuel. Whatever central authority remains lacks the resources to reimpose order. Bands of pitiful, maimed survivors scavenge among the ruins of grandeur. Grass grows in the streets. There is no higher goal than survival.”

The elites, trained in business schools and managerial programs not to solve real problems but to maintain at any cost the systems of global capitalism, profit personally from the assault. They amass inconceivable sums of wealth while their victims, the underclasses around the globe, are thrust into increasing distress from global warming, poverty and societal breakdown. The apparatus of government, seized by this corporate cabal, is hostile to genuine change. It passes laws, as it did for Denton, Texas, afterresidents voted to outlaw fracking in their city, to overturn the ability of local communities to control their own resources. It persecutes dissidents, along with environmental and animal rights activists, who try to halt the insanity. The elites don’t work for us. They don’t work for the planet. They orchestrate the gaiacide. And they are well paid for it.

The Anthropocene Age—the age of humans, which has caused mass extinctions of plant and animal species and the pollution of the soil, air and oceans—is upon us. The pace of destruction is accelerating. Climate scientists say that sea levels, for example, are rising three times faster than predicted and that the Arctic ice is vanishing at rates that were unforeseen. “If carbon dioxide concentrations reach 550 ppm,” writes Clive Hamilton in “Requiem for a Species,” “after which emissions fell to zero, the global temperature would continue to rise for at least another century.” We have already passed 400 parts per million, a figure not seen on earth for 3 million to 5 million years. We are on track to reach at least 550 ppm by 2100.

The breakdown of the planet, many predict, will be nonlinear, meaning that various systems that sustain life—as Tainter chronicles in his study of collapsed civilizations—will disintegrate simultaneously. The infrastructures that distribute food, supply our energy, ensure our security, produce and transport our baffling array of products, and maintain law and order will crumble at once. It won’t be much fun: Soaring temperatures. Submerged island states and coastal cities. Mass migrations. Species extinction. Monster storms. Droughts. Famines. Declining crop yields. And a security and surveillance apparatus, along with militarized police, that will employ harsher and harsher methods to cope with the chaos. 

We have to let go of our relentless positivism, our absurd mania for hope, and face the bleakness of reality before us. To resist means to acknowledge that we are living in a world already heavily damaged by global warming. It means refusing to participate in the destruction of the planet. It means noncooperation with authority. It means defying in every way possible consumer capitalism, militarism and imperialism. It means adjusting our lifestyle, including what we eat, to thwart the forces bent upon our annihilation.

The animal agriculture industry has, in a staggering act of near total censorship, managed to stifle public discussion about the industry’s complicity in global warming. It is barely mentioned in climate summits. Yet livestock and their byproducts, as Kip Andersen and Keegan Kuhn point out in their book, “The Sustainability Secret,” and their documentary,“Cowspiracy,” account for at least 32,000 million tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) per year, or 51 percent of all worldwide greenhouse gas emissions. Methane and nitrous oxide are rarely mentioned in climate talks, although those two greenhouse gases are, as the authors point out, respectively, 86 times and 296 times more destructive than carbon dioxide. Cattle, worldwide, they write, produce 150 billion gallons of methane daily. And 65 percent of the nitrous oxide produced by human-related activities is caused by the animal agriculture industry. Water used in fracking, they write, ranges from 70 billion to 140 billion gallons annually. Animal agriculture water consumption, the book notes, ranges from 34 trillion to 76 trillion gallons annually. Raising animals for human consumption takes up to 45 percent of the planet’s land. Ninety-one percent of the deforestation of the Amazon rain forest and up to 80 percent of global rain forest loss are caused by clearing land for the grazing of livestock and growing feed crops for meat and dairy animals. As more and more rain forest disappears, the planet loses one of its primary means to safely sequester carbon dioxide. The animal agriculture industry is, as Andersen and Kuhn write, also a principal cause of species extinction and the creation of more than 95,000 square miles of nitrogen-flooded dead zones in the oceans.

A person who eats a vegan diet, they point out, a diet free of meat, dairy and eggs, saves 1,100 gallons of water, 45 pounds of grain, 30 square feet of forested land, 20 pounds CO2 equivalent, and one animal’s life every day.

The animal agriculture industry has pushed through “Ag-Gag” laws in many states that criminalize protests, critiques of the industry, and whistleblowing attempts to bring the public’s attention to the staggering destruction wrought on the environment by the business of raising 70 billion land animals every year worldwide to be exploited and consumed by humans. And they have done so, I presume, because defying the animal agriculture industry is as easy as deciding not to put animal products—which have tremendous, scientifically proven health risks—into your mouth.

We have little time left. Those who are despoiling the earth do so for personal gain, believing they can use their privilege to escape the fate that will befall the human species. We may not be able to stop the assault. But we can refuse to abet it. The idols of power and greed, as the biblical prophets warned us, threaten to doom the human race.

Timothy Pachirat recounts in his book, “Every Twelve Seconds: Industrialized Slaughter and the Politics of Sight,” an Aug. 5, 2004, story in the Omaha World-Herald. An “old-timer” who lived five miles from the Omaha slaughterhouses recalled the wind carrying the stench of the almost six and a half million cattle, sheep and hogs killed each year in south Omaha. The sickly odor permeated buildings throughout the area.

“It was the smell of money,” the old-timer said. “It was the smell of money.”

“The Sustainability Secret,” a book quoted in this column, has an introduction by Truthdig columnist Chris Hedges and was ghostwritten by Truthdig’s books editor, Eunice Wong.

Chris Hedges, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter, writes a regular column for Truthdig every Monday. Hedges' most recent book is "Wages of Rebellion: The Moral Imperative of Revolt."

CBS’s John Dickerson, the debate's moderator, asked Sanders : “You said you want to rid the planet of ISIS. In the previous debate you said the greatest threat to national security is climate change. Do you still believe that?”

“Absolutely,” Sen. Sanders replied. “Climate change is directly related to the growth of terrorism and if we do not get our act together and listen to what the scientists say, you’re going to see countries all over the world, this is what the CIA says, they’re going to be struggling over limited amounts of water, limited amounts of land to grow their crops and you’re going to see all kinds of international conflict. But, of course international terrorism is major issue that we have to address today.”

RELATED: 4 Reasons Climate Change Affects National Security

Climate change will take center stage in Paris at the COP21 climate talks from Nov. 30 – Dec. 11. A senior French diplomatic source told Reuters Saturday—after the deadly attacks in Paris—that the “French government plans to go ahead with a climate change summit.” French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius said the climate conference would go ahead as planned. “COP21 must be held,” he said.

A U.S. official announced Saturday that the Paris terrorist attacks will not stop President Obama from attending the climate talks. “President Barack Obama still plans to participate in a UN climate conference near Paris in two weeks, despite attacks that killed 128 people in the French capital,” the official said.

World leaders, from more than 190 nations, will gather in Paris for COP21 to discuss a possible new global agreement on climate change that would reduce greenhouse gas emissions to avoid the catastrophic consequences of global warming.

The oceans cover more than 70 percent of the Earth's surface and contain 97 percent of the Earth's water. But they remain largely a mystery to us. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, less than five percent of the world's oceans have been explored. It has often been said that we know more about the moon than we do the oceans. 

But one thing we do know about the oceans is that they are getting more and more polluted. From plastic trash and discarded fishing gear to oil spills and pesticide runoff, human beings have treated the oceans as a vast dumping ground. As a result, marine life is dying and oceanic ecosystems have been put at risk. 

RELATED: Scuba Divers’ Haunting Photos Show Devastating Impact of Ocean Trash on Marine Life

As famed oceanographer and conservationist Jacques-Yves Cousteau once observed, "We forget that the water cycle and the life cycle are one." Thus, if we destroy the oceans, we destroy ourselves. 

Check out this eye-opening infographic by online scuba diving magazing Dive.in to find out exactly how we are affected by all the ocean pollution we have created.

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Power plants that have traditionally burned coal to generate electricity have found a solution: burning wood. And the growing demand for biomass in Europe — where forests are often highly regulated — has been filled in large part by the American wood pellet industry.

According to a new, first-of-its-kind report (with an accompanying fact sheet) authored by the Natural Resources Defense Council in conjunction with the Conservation Biology Institute, there's a big problem with this arrangement: Due to increasing European demand, wood pellet production has put 15 million acres of unprotected forests in the southeastern United States at risk.

These regions, which make up an area nearly the size of West Virginia, include critical habitat for more than 600 imperiled, threatened or endangered species. In addition, pollution from logging in these regions has put more than 18,000 miles of impaired freshwater rivers and streams at new risk.

The report's authors paint an evocative picture of an endangered ecosystem that is being pushed to the edge by a destructive logging industry:

Rare and precious, these mature forests are the heart of the region's natural ecosystem, supporting globally outstanding biodiversity and unique natural communities that provide a host of vital ecosystem services to the people of the region. Nurturing healthy rivers and streams meander through bald cypress and tupelo trees that tower in the beautiful river swamps. Abundant cavities in tree trunks and branches are home to woodpeckers, flying squirrels, and owls. Along backwater rivers, Atlantic white cedar once formed extensive swamps. In the region's bogs, carnivorous plants such as Venus flytraps and pitcher plants are now found only in small areas. These forests provide habitat for one of the highest concentrations of endangered species in North America, including numerous songbirds, Louisiana black bears, endangered bats and butterflies, and even rare varieties of synchronous fireflies, about which researchers are still learning.

Eight states in the southeastern U.S. — Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina and Virginia — currently make up the primary exporting region for wood pellets supplying the EU, with the top importers being Belgium, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom. The report has indentified three specific hot spots of grave concern in which there are 35 proposed or existing mills — the Virginia/North Carolina border, Southeastern Georgia and the Alabama/Mississippi border — with Louisiana an emerging fourth hot spot.

I had a chance to talk to Debbie Hammel, the director of the Land Markets Initiative at NRDC, about this alarming new report. We also discussed the misconceptions of biomass energy that have led to this crisis point, and the true cost of Europe's wood pellet demand on the ecology of the southeastern United States.

Reynard Loki: How long has the NRDC been working on the wood pellet issue?

Debbie Hammel: We've been focused on this issue for the last two years. We launched a campaign in 2013 as we saw the pellet industry expanding across the southeast. We were very concerned at that point that the renewable energy policies in the EU were going to drive a rapid expansion and that this was going to represent a new level of threat to southern forests broadly. We have spent the last couple of years educating policy-makers in the EU and the UK to let them know that the loopholes they've created in their renewable energy policies — that recognize woody biomass as carbon-neutral — are driving this expansion and threaten not just forests in the southeast but will actually increase their carbon emissions over the near and medium term.

RL: Isn't it a widely held belief that biomass energy is less carbon intensive than fossil fuel?

DH: That's been the myth for the last few years, and that's one of the big problems with the EU policies: They recognize all woody biomass as being carbon-neutral. What that means in practice is that when you burn it, you are assuming it won't add carbon emissions to the atmosphere, that it will be better and actually reduce carbon emissions as compared to the fossil fuels they replace. All of the recent science over the last couple of years however, has shown that this assumption is actually incorrect. When you cut down a tree and grind it into pellets and burn it, you're instantaneously releasing all of that carbon that's been soaked up by that tree into the atmosphere, and it takes decades for a tree to grow back and soak up that carbon again. It's also much less efficient than burning fossil fuel, so you have to burn a lot more wood to create the equivalent amount of energy.

RL: Have you gotten any traction from policymakers in the UK and the EU?

DH: Over the last two years, we have certainly opened their eyes. I think that when they first developed this policy, they did it with good intentions and didn't understand the science behind carbon as it relates to biomass. Also, I don't think they expected to see the scale of expansion that we are seeing in the southeast. I think it has surprised them that there has been such an explosive growth in pellet facilities in the southeast in response to this policy. Today they are much more aware of how problematic the carbon issue is. They are also much more sensitive to the fact that these pellet facilities pose a real threat to some of the most sensitive forests across the southeast.

RL: Is the American southeast the main supplier for the UK and the EU in terms of wood pellets?

DH: Yes. They make up 98 percent or more of the exports of wood pellets that are destined for the UK and the EU.

RL: What's at stake ecologically?

DH: These forests, especially bottomland forests, represent a unique habitat in the southeastern United States. These sensitive and irreplaceable forests are home for the highest number of endangered, imperiled and vulnerable species in North America. They also provide many ecosystem services to communities in the southeast, from clean water to flood control and are important to the culture and the heritage of the region.

RL: Logging is already happening in these forests, and the pellet industry is only a portion of the total timber industry, correct?

DH: Yes, and that is actually one of the problems. You already have a healthy pulp and paper and saw timber industry in the south that are already logging these forests, and the pellet industry is a new level of demand coming in and just intensifying the pressure on that existing resource.

RL: If the pellet industry ended, would the current level of logging in these forests be sustainable?

DH: No. The bottomland hardwood forests need greater protection overall anyway, even in the absence of the pellet industry. These are unique forests. Very few of them are protected in the southeast from any type of logging. Only 10 percent of the remaining bottomland hardwood forests in the south have any kind of formal protection from logging activities, be it for pulp and paper, saw timber or pellets. Even in the absence of the pellet industry, these forests are critical and endangered, and they need greater protection in the U.S. Any new level of demand, however, just intensifies the threat.

RL: What kinds of protections against unsustainable logging are already in place?

DH: If we're talking about formal protection that prevents any kind of commercial logging, that would only include forests that are on some public lands such as national parks, national monuments and wildlife refuges. But very few of the bottomland forests in the south are covered by those kinds of stringent protections — as I said, only 10 percent of the remaining bottomland hardwood forests in the south have any kind of formal protection from logging activities. Other regulations that exist are either not mandatory, are applied inconsistently or not adequately monitored. For example, there are some voluntary best management practices at the state level in the U.S. south. They primarily relate to water quality issues, but they're voluntary. They're generally not well enforced, and they're monitored only periodically.

RL: What about the Endangered Species Act?

The ESA relies on a landowner reporting to the wildlife authorities that they have an endangered species on their lands. In the absence of that reporting, that goes unenforced as well. When it comes to mandatory regulations for forest management in the south, there really are very few. None protect these bottomland forests from what we're seeing happen with the increased demand from the pellet industry, which is they are being clear-cut — an intensive logging practice that completely removes all of the trees from the forest.

The Louisiana black bear, a protected subspecies of the black bear, was the original inspiration for the “Teddy Bear.” The focus of conservation efforts for more than two decades, the Louisiana black bear is now facing habitat loss due to the wood pellet industry.

DH: Right now we're working to stop the out-of-control demand at the EU level by calling for a reform of their current policies. The expansion of the pellet industry in the American southeast is being driven primarily by the carbon loophole, that incorrectly recognizes all biomass as carbon-neutral, and the lack of adequate sustainability safeguards that would protect sensitive forests, in EU renewable energy policies.

RL: What are your specific goals with the EU?

DH: We are asking the EU to do three things. First, close the carbon loophole and make sure that their policies adequately account for carbon emissions —recognizing only those forms of biomass that can actually reduce carbon emissions as compared to fossil fuels over the near-term. Second, increase the rigor of their sustainability standards to make sure that none of the biomass is coming from sensitive forest ecosystems, such as bottomland hardwood forests. And third, cap the amount of biomass that would be eligible under current policies because there is a very limited supply of what could be considered lower carbon and more sustainable biomass out there in the marketplace. Simply put, the scale of demand from converting all of these power facilities is going to exceed the actual availability of low carbon, more sustainable biomass. They need to cap it or they will cause irreparable harm to sensitive forests here in the southern U.S. and end up increasing carbon emissions at a critical time for addressing climate change.

RL: Is there an economic benefit to the south with the wood pellet industry?

DH: The wood pellet industry likes to say that there is an economic benefit to the south. They say that this sector creates jobs and helps the economy to recover. What they don’t say however, is that it is heavily subsidized through government financial support in the UK and in the EU more broadly. The activity of creating pellets in the southeast and shipping them across the Atlantic to the UK or other member states in the EU would not be economic if it weren't for these subsidies.

Drax Power, which is the largest energy producer in the UK and has converted three of their facilities to burning biomass, stands to receive around 660 million British pounds in subsidies in 2016 alone. They are currently the largest user of wood pellets from the southern United States, but are only able to do this because they are receiving all of this government money. If it wasn't for that, they wouldn't have gone this direction. It wouldn't have penciled out. The jobs that are being created in the south for the pellet industry hinge on the continuation of these subsidies, which are very dicey at this point and not guaranteed over the long-term. The UK has already eliminated one of the subsidies for this sector and they could very well eliminate the others over the next few years. When those financial supports go, the economic legs sustaining the pellet industry will collapse, and so will the jobs.

RL: What is your prognosis if the wood pellet industry in the south continues business as usual? Are we looking at the permanent destruction of these forests in some years?

DH: I believe we are. Some of these forests were cut many, many years ago and have only just started to recover. It can take 100 years or more for bottomland hardwood forests to recover, if they ever do. They are very sensitive. Because they are wetland forests, they are very dependent upon the water that they live in and around, the hydrology of the system. If that system is severely impacted through clear-cut logging, some of these forests will actually never fully recover.

Furthermore, the species that are reliant on these forests, especially the older bottomland hardwood forests, will also disappear. The younger bottomland forests that are trying to recover from these clear-cuts cannot provide the kind of habitat needed for some of these species, so we will simply lose those older forests and the species that are associated with them.

RL: If you had to pick an endangered species to be the face of this issue, which would you pick?

DH: That's a hard question because there are a lot of endangered or imperiled species out there that we've looked at, but the Louisiana black bear is certainly high up on that list. There are a number of songbirds that I would put on that list as well. But in terms of an iconic sort of animal that is important to the system, it would be the Louisiana black bear.

Earlier this month, President Obama announced his decision to reject approval for the Keystone XL pipeline, which would have brought fuel from the Canadian tar sands through the heartland of the U.S. to the Gulf of Mexico. Because this oil emits more greenhouse gases than other forms of fuel, the decision had everything to do with climate change and came just a month prior to the United Nations climate talks in Paris.

“America is now a global leader when it comes to taking serious action to fight climate change,” Obama stated. “And frankly, approving this project would have undercut that global leadership.”

While environmental groups hailed the Keystone announcement, they have criticized the Administration’s push for a massive new trade agreement called the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) as a big step backward on climate. In fact, the proposed agreement, finally made public last week, is literally in climate denial: nowhere in its 5,000-plus pages do the words “climate change” appear.

In many ways, the TPP is a broad attack on locally based economies that protect the climate and support renewable energy. Instead, the agreement tilts the playing field in favor of multinational corporations and financial institutions. Fortunately, it’s far from a done deal.

The TPP is considered the largest free trade agreement ever negotiated, with the countries involved contributing 40 percent of global GDP. It includes the U.S. and 11 other Pacific Rim countries: Mexico, Canada, Peru, Chile, Japan, Vietnam, Australia, New Zealand, Malaysia, Singapore, and Brunei.

The TPP expands trade by lowering tariffs, which are taxes on imported products like food, shoes, or fuel. But it goes much further than that. It sets a common system of regulations and rules for corporations operating in TPP countries — all designed to accelerate trade. With 30 chapters, the TPP sets rules for things like patents for medicines (and plants), how governments can purchase goods and services, and how the financial sector and food safety can be regulated. It also establishes an independent legal structure to enforce these rules.

While the TPP doesn’t mention climate change explicitly, many of its provisions would have important implications for the climate, aside from the simple fact that expanded trade increases greenhouse gas emissions related to transportation.

Here are a few of the big concerns with the TPP:

1. It expands the rights of corporations to challenge regulations.

The TPP establishes special legal rights of foreign corporations to challenge new regulations that it views could impact future profits. These corporate rights, first established under NAFTA in 1994, would be granted to corporations in all TPP countries. As an example, TransCanada is currently considering whether to bring a NAFTA challenge over President Obama’s rejection of the Keystone pipeline. Other corporate rights cases challenging fracking bans and the rights of oil companies to drill offshore point to how regulations that mitigate climate change could be challenged under the TPP.

2. It drives natural gas exports and production.

The TPP mandates the automatic approval of Liquified Natural Gas (LNG) export permits to TPP countries, a policy the Sierra Club says is likely to lead to an increase in fracking. Japan is already the world’s largest importer of natural gas, and anticipates importing much more if the TPP is approved. Fracking has not only been linked to air and water pollution; the process is a high emitter of greenhouse gases, and it further locks in a fossil-fuel based system of energy over renewable options.

3. Limiting support for local, renewable energy systems.

The U.S. Trade Representative is the government agency that represents the United States in trade negotiations. One of its priorities in the TPP has been to eliminate what it calls “localization barriers to trade,” which means striking down government programs that give preference to local or national businesses. But this is not just for other countries—the same rules would apply here in the United States. A recent trade tribunal at the World Trade Organization gives an example of what this looks like in practice: The tribunal ruled against an Ontario policy designed to create local green jobs through locally sourced renewable energy.

Fortunately, the TPP is far from a done deal. While President Obama has signaled his intention to sign it, Congress still has to approve it. A Congressional vote likely won’t come until early spring, though political maneuvering could delay the vote, perhaps until after the 2016 elections.

And congressional approval is not inevitable. Congress barely passed fast track earlier this year — which set the timeline and process for congressional approval of TPP. Many congressional leaders and presidential candidates from both parties have expressed deep concerns about TPP.

The TPP also opens the door for an important debate about the values we want our economy to reflect. The deal reinforces and reflects an old economic system tied to fossil fuels and dominated by multinational corporations. That older model runs head-on into growing new economy initiatives and businesses building more localized systems for food, energy, and other services, grounded in racial and economic equity.

A truly new vision for trade would reflect the values of this new economy, not undermine them. Such a vision would start by rejecting the current secretive process, accessible only to corporate advisors, for negotiating future trade deals. The TPP fight is an important political opportunity to reject an outdated economic model, while building power for the new economy many are already creating.

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Ben Lilliston is the director of climate strategies at the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy. He has worked as a researcher, writer, and editor at a number of organizations including the Center for Study of Responsive Law, the Corporate Crime Reporter, Multinational Monitor, Cancer Prevention Coalition and Sustain. He’s a frequently published writer, most recently as a contributor to Mandate for Change (Lexington), and previously as the co-author of the book Genetically Engineered Foods: A Guide for Consumers (Avalon).

I landed in Calcutta (Kolkata, if you are a stickler for official names) on November 30, the day the world leaders, policy makers, and environmental activists gathered in Paris to figure out how to curb climate change. Officially, it’s wintertime in this city of my birth, but the air on Monday night was anything but chilly. Instead, it was uncomfortably muggy. The only sign of winter was the hazy air — a regular year-end feature in this overcrowded, traffic-choked metropolis in eastern India.

The unusually warm weather might be an anomaly, at least that’s what the local weathermen say, but in my experience, winters here have certainly become milder in recent years. (While winter is receding here, the waters are rising. Calcutta is among coastal cities across the world most vulnerable to 

The rains in Chennai, India have broken a 100-year-old record. The image above was taken back in October.

Meanwhile farther south by the tip of the Indian peninsula, another coastal city, Chennai, has been flooded for two months due to torrential rains that have submerged homes and disrupted normal life. The Indian Army has been deployed there to rescue people stranded in their homes.

The rains have broken a 100-year-old record with one day's rainfall covering an entire month's average in a city that’s more used to blazing heat than damp days.

When I spoke with a journalist friend living there last morning (it’s past 3 a.m. Thursday morning here as I write this), she was stuck in her second floor apartment with her invalid mother and little girl with no power. Her cellphone, the only way she can connect with the outside world, had barely any charge left. The first floor of her building was completely inundated and she feared the waters would soon rise further. “Even if the rescue boats come, I can’t leave because they most likely won’t be able to evacuate my mother,” she told me, before I hung up, not wanting to waste her cellphone charge needlessly. I haven’t heard from her since.

This is it: the real, harsh, personal face of climate change. Given such stark news, it was doubly depressing to read a new report by Climate Action Tracker that shows that thousands of new coal plants being planned in countries across the world, including India, could doom efforts to contain global warming.

If all the 2,440 coal plants in the pipeline were to be built, by 2030, emissions from coal power would be 400 percent higher than what is consistent with a 2°C pathway, says the “Coal Gap” report, which was released in Paris on Tuesday. Using data from Earth Island Institute’s CoalSwarm project’s updated Global Coal Plant Tracker, the researchers calculated the effect of coal-fired power on global emissions and concluded that even with no new construction, in 2030, emissions from coal-fired power generation would still be more than 150 percent higher than what is consistent with holding warming below 2°C.

The researchers based their assessment on planned new coal plants both globally, and in the eight countries that each plan to build more than 5GW of coal power capacity: China, India, Indonesia, Japan, South Africa, South Korea, the Philippines, Turkey — plus the EU28. In emerging economies, like India, the plants are being planned in hopes of meeting rapidly increasing electricity demand, while in the EU28, new coal plants will mainly replace existing capacity.

Of course, the biggest offender here is China, which has 722 planned plants that would emit 2.2 gigatons of carbon emissions a year. But India isn’t lagging too far behind. The report notes that the large amounts of new coal capacity planned in India and Turkey “could have a relatively significant impact.” 

“In India, stopping new coal fired power plants to be built could mitigate 0.7 GtCO [gigatons of carbon emissions], provided low carbon technologies are implemented,” it adds.

The researchers say, ideally, plans for these plants should be canceled, but I sincerely doubt that will happen. At least not here in India, where coal companies have deep ties with the political class, and where the environment minister (who’s currently in Paris) gives that same old line about the floods in Chennai being a “natural calamity” that “can’t be directly linked to climate change.”

Maureen Nandini Mitra is the managing editor of Earth Island Journal. Her work has also appeared in the San Francisco Public Press, the New Internationalist, Sueddeutsche Zeitung, the Caravan and Down to Earth.

The key passage — the forward-looking passage — of President Obama’s speech last week rejecting the Keystone XL pipeline came right at the end, after he rehashed all the arguments about jobs and gas prices that had been litigated endlessly over the last few years.

Ultimately,” he said, “if we’re going to prevent large parts of this Earth from becoming not only inhospitable but uninhabitable in our lifetimes, we’re going to have keep some fossil fuels in the ground rather than burn them and release more dangerous pollution into the sky.”

This is a remarkable evolution for the president. He came into office with “Drill Baby Drill” ringing in his ears from the 2008 Republican convention, and baby did he drill. Before his first term was out, he gave a speech in front a stack of oil pipe in Oklahoma in which he laid out his accomplishments:

“Now, under my administration, America is producing more oil today than at any time in the last eight years. That's important to know. Over the last three years, I’ve directed my administration to open up millions of acres for gas and oil exploration across 23 different states. We’re opening up more than 75 percent of our potential oil resources offshore. We’ve quadrupled the number of operating rigs to a record high. We’ve added enough new oil and gas pipeline to encircle the Earth and then some. So we are drilling all over the place.”

Obama believed he could balance all this drilling with an effort to cut demand for fossil fuels. In his first term he used the Detroit bailout to skillfully exact big increases in auto mileage, and in his second term he’s employed EPA’s regulatory authority to imperil coal-fired power plants. And his team carefully negotiated an agreement with China that pledges rollbacks in the emissions of these superpowers. These were not exactly easy lifts, but they’re the kind of step politicians like to take: They work in fairly hidden ways, and they really bite later, once you’re out of office.

Oh, and they would have been more or less enough — 25 years ago. Back then we had plenty of steps we could still take that would have moved us gradually on to a new energy trajectory — low but rising prices on carbon, say. But we didn’t take those steps, in part we now know because energy giants like Exxon simply lied about what they knew, and bred a quarter-century worth of phony debate that prevented real action. Now we’re in literal hot water (hot enough that an international team of scientists recently confirmed that a worldwide wave of coral-bleaching is underway.) Which means that the president’s suite of policy initiatives were by definition too little too late. Not unimportant, but by themselves clearly insufficient to lead the world in the race to catch up with physics.

Keystone, by contrast, was the kind of decision politicians hate to make. Here was a big project with lots of money on the line, a clear priority for important players. (The Koch Brothers, never forget, are the largest foreign leaseholders in Canada’s tarsands). So on the one side was the conventional power of the fossil fuel industry, which literally Never Loses. And on the other side was — at the outset — a slightly motley environmental crew of scientists, indigenous people, farmers and ranchers. That small fight eventually attracted lots of others, who saw an opening for venting their great fear of climate change. They were willing to go to jail, and on the back of that commitment came the big green environmental groups, media attention, and the resulting dilemma for the president: Who do I disappoint?

After holding off for four years, the answer was: the oil industry. Which is a very new development. As recently as this summer he’d been willing to give them permission to go drill in the Arctic. But that permission was met with true outrage, enough so that when Shell slunk away in September the administration said it would be giving out no more permits for the Arctic Sea.

One thing that’s changed is the economics of energy. It’s beginning to look like the drop in oil prices is more than just the usual boom-bust cycle. Instead, it’s starting to reflect the dramatic, exponentially accelerating rise in renewable energy. Over the course of Obama’s decision-making on Keystone XL, for instance, the price of a solar panel dropped more than 80 percent. All of a sudden the oil companies look a little tiny bit less mighty.

And the other thing that’s happened is heat. Obama’s term turned out to be the moment when global warming became undeniable to everyone who hadn’t blinded themselves for the sake of ideology or profit. 2015 will be the hottest year ever measured, smashing the record set in…2014. We’ve burned more of America this year than ever before. Our biggest, richest state is in a drought like none that’s been measured before.

The realization that we had no more time to wait became mathematical in 2012, when a few of us started spreading what at the time seemed like a fringe idea: that the data showed the fossil fuel companies had four or five times as much carbon in their reserves as we could ever safely burn. This argument was fringe at first, but a mushrooming divestment movement spread it across the globe. By this fall it was the governor of the Bank of England, Mark Carney, speaking on the floor of Lloyds of London, who was making the case that we faced “huge risk” from “unburnable carbon” that was likely to become a “stranded asset.”

In this new world, the political equation begins to shift. Four years ago neither Obama nor Romney even mentioned climate change during their presidential battle. This year Bernie Sanders has made it one of the two centerpieces of his campaign (alongside inequality), and he’s skillfully pulled Hillary Clinton along with him. She has so far ended up opposing Keystone and Arctic drilling, but also lifting the ban on crude oil exports. Meanwhile, with polling showing that even 59 percent of Republicans take climate change seriously, the GOP candidates are scrambling to figure out some middle ground that both satisfies the Kochs and doesn’t make them look like loons.

All of this is to say: Read President Obama’s decision as the decision of a weathervane. That’s not an attack — that’s pretty much the way politics work. The (interlocking) combination of a strong movement, strong alternative sources of energy, and the strong signal from the natural world make it easier for him to reject Keystone than approve it. There are other signs of the direction this political wind is now blowing: New York attorney general Eric Schneiderman, for instance, has issued subpoenas to the word’s richest and most powerful company, asking Exxon to explain its catalogue of deceptions over the last quarter century. That’s a gutsy move — but in this new context not a suicidal one. Maybe it’s even a brilliant one politically, which could end up making him a hero in the mold of Teddy Roosevelt breaking up the Standard Oil trust.

As to where it blows next, remember the president’s words in announcing his Keystone decision: “We have to keep some fossil fuels in the ground.” With Keystone he kept some Canadian fossil fuels in the ground, but the pressure builds to do the same at home. Without asking Congress, he can exercise his jurisdiction over public lands in the U.S. — an interesting test will come later this year when he decides whether to lease the offshore Atlantic Ocean for oil drilling. Perhaps they’ll even give up offering up the vast coal deposits of the Powder River basin.

Don’t expect President Obama (or President Clinton) to be out in the lead, and don’t expect Congress to do a damn thing. They’ll need that same kind of movement out there pushing them (as Senator Sanders and Senator Jeff Merkley (D-Oregon) pointed out last week when they launched the Keep It in the Ground Act on Capitol Hill.) The job of movements is to keep brewing up the gale-force winds that shifted our political landscape last week — and to hope we can do it before hurricane- force winds, drought, flood, and sea level rise shift our landscape landscape.

Bill McKibben is the Schumann Distinguished Scholar in Environmental Studies at Middlebury College, the founder of 350.org, an international climate campaign, and the winner of the 2014 Right Livelihood Award.

“Solar technology is evolving, costs are coming down and grid connectivity is improving,” he said. “The dream of universal access to clean energy is becoming more real. This will be the foundation of the new economy of the new century.”

Modi described the solar alliance as “the sunrise of new hope, not just for clean energy but for villages and homes still in darkness, for mornings and evening filled with a clear view of the glory of the sun”.

Earlier, France’s climate change ambassador, Laurence Tubiana, had called the group “a true game-changer”.

While signatory nations mostly hail from the tropics, several European countries are also on board with the initiative, including France.

Hollande described the project as climate justice in action, mobilising public finance from richer states to help deliver universal energy access. 

“What we are putting in place is an avant garde of countries that believe in renewable energies,” he told a press conference in Paris. “What we are showing here is an illustration of the future Paris accord, as this initiative gives meaning to sharing technology and mobilising financial resources in an example of what we wish to do in the course of the climate conference.”

The Indian government is investing an initial $30m (£20m) in setting up the alliance’s headquarters in India. The eventual goal is to raise $400m from membership fees, and international agencies.

Companies involved in the project include Areva, Engie, Enel, HSBC France and Tata Steel.

“It is very, very exciting to see India nailing its colours to the mast and providing leadership on this issue,” said James Watson, the director of SolarPower Europe, which represents the continents’ solar photovoltaic industry. “It will mean more opportunities for solar across the world and that can only be positive for combating climate change.”

The UN secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, placed the initiative in the context of the body’s sustainable development goals, particularly a related target, set in 2011, of achieving universal access to sustainable energy by 2030.

India has repeatedly said that it wants to use cheap solar to connect citizens who are currently without access to the electricity grid in remote and rural areas.

“The idea is that larger markets and bigger volumes will lead to lower costs, making it possible to spur demand,” said Ajay Mathur, India’s senior negotiator and spokesperson at the Paris summit.

“This bold effort could bring affordable solar power to tropical villages and communities worldwide,” said Jennifer Morgan, the director of the World Research Institute’s climate programme.

India’s pledge to the Paris summit offered to draw 40% of its electricity from renewables by 2030. The country is projected to be the world’s most populous by then, with 1.45 billion people.

Climate Action Tracker described the promise as being “at the least ambitious end of what would be a fair contribution”, and not consistent with meeting a 2C target. 

But some see Modi as a clean energy enabler, having rapidly rolled out more than 900MW of solar energy across Gujaratwhen he was chief minister there.

“India has emerged as the natural leader for this alliance, with its ambitious targets to install 175GW of renewable energy by 2022,” said Arunabha Ghosh, chief executive of the Council for  Environment and Water in India.

Modi’s announcement on Monday comes hot on the heels of a pledge by the US and 18 other countries to provide $20bn for clean energy research by 2020, a doubling of current funding commitments.

A separate Breakthrough Energy Coalition, which will act as an investment platform for clean energy projects, is also being launched on Monday by Bill Gates and the Facebook founder, Mark Zuckerberg. 

On Sunday, Dubai announced a Dh100bn ($27bn) programme to make solar panels mandatory for all rooftop buildings by 2030, part of a plan to make the city a global clean energy centre. 

Dubai aims to generate 25% of its energy from clean sources by 2030,

The Indian initiative, called the International Agency for Solar Technologies and Applications (Iasta), aims to spread cheap solar technology across the globe with pooled policy knowledge.

“We share a collective ambition to undertake innovative and concerted efforts aimed at reducing the costs of financing and urgent technological deployment for competitive solar facilities throughout our country,” a membership statement by the alliance says.

It adds that the alliance will “pave the way for production technologies and storage of solar energy, adapted to the specific needs of our country”. 

Arthur Neslen is the Europe environment correspondent at the Guardian. He has previously worked for the BBC, the Economist, Al Jazeera, and EurActiv, where his journalism won environmental awards. He has written two books about Israeli and Palestinian identity.

Here’s why.

1. This may be the last chance we have to take concerted global action. We will only succeed in addressing the climate crisis by unifying governments, businesses and citizens to act together.

Since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, we have been burning fossil fuels and deforesting wide swaths of land to fuel human development. Climate cycles respond very slowly to increasing concentrations of greenhouse gases in the oceans and atmosphere—so the effects we feel today are the result of actions taken decades ago. Even in a hypothetical scenario in which we stop deforesting and no one, anywhere, uses fossil fuels ever again, climate cycles will continue to change for decades. But if global leaders at the UN Paris Climate Talks do not reach an agreement that curbs fossil fuel use in a significant way, the concentration of pollutants and gases will increase the speed of climate change and make the effects of climate change much more violent.

2. Climate instability = increased food insecurity and violence.

For farmers all over the world, being able to rely on regular weather patterns is crucial. When these patterns change unpredictably, entire crops can be lost. Climate change is already impacting crop yields around the world, especially wheat and coffee.

Beyond unpredictable rains, climate change means generally warmer temperatures, more heat waves, and increased risk of droughts, floods, and mega-natural disasters—all of which compromise food security and can lead to displaced populations, climate refugees, and increased violence. In fact, extended drought is a  major contributing factor to the conflict in Syria. Experts predict that persistently low crop yields for staples such as wheat or rice in developing countries could lead to mass migrations and violent conflicts. A successful climate agreement in Paris is important to a stable food supply and therefore to global security.

3. The deforestation double-whammy.

The Rainforest Alliance works in everything from agriculture to tourism to carbon—but everything always comes back to forests. Protecting forests is at the root of our mission and has been for more than 25 years.

That’s because forests play a crucial role as water and air purifiers, filtering out pollution and sequestering greenhouse gases. They also halt erosion and provide economic opportunities to the communities that live in the forest. And studies show that forests help regulate climate all over the world—so the Amazon rainforest helps control rainfall as far away as California.

When forests are chopped down, the negative effects are twofold. We lose the valuable carbon dioxide-to-oxygen respiration from the trees, while also releasing tons of carbon dioxide that had been stored in the forests. At the UN Paris Climate Talks, the Rainforest Alliance and other like-minded organizations will discuss the importance of land use and how we can keep forests standing to help mitigate climate change.

4. Acidic oceans

You may have heard the phrase “ocean acidification” bandied about, but what does it actually mean? Put simply, the ocean is growing more and more acidic as we continue to burn fossil fuels. The carbon dioxide released by burning these fossil fuels is absorbed into the ocean, where it dissolves into the water and begins to change ocean chemistry.

In more acidic ocean waters, hard-shelled marine organisms like oysters, crabs, snails, and tiny zooplankton have difficulty creating and maintaining their hard shells. The lower pH of the ocean water causes these hard shells to disintegrate, rippling up the food chain and ultimately effecting the larger predatory fish we eat. When about 12 percent of the world’s population depends on fisheries and aquaculture, that’s a big deal—and you can forget about sushi.

5. Coffee and coffee farmers

Climate change will affect everyone, everywhere, to some degree, but tropical areas will be hit especially hard. This is bad news for those of us who enjoy food and other commodities that come from the tropics, such as coffee, bananas, and cocoa (in other words, everyone).

Farmers in tropical zones are already experiencing those unpredictable weather patterns we mentioned earlier. Warmer, wetter summers have prompted an outbreak of coffee rust, a parasitic fungus that causes entire coffee crops to wither and die. And coffee can only grow within a very specific temperature range—the warmer it gets, the less likely farmers will be able to harvest enough coffee to support themselves and their families. For many coffee farmers whose sole income comes from coffee, the changing climate has already devastated their livelihoods.

Sustainable farming  methods can help, and an international agreement in Paris could make all the difference in driving agricultural transformation at the scale needed to help farming communities in tropical latitudes.

6. Women, children, and indigenous communities first.

Developing nations feel the effects of climate change the most. The people who live in this less-developed areas do not have access to the infrastructure or services that offer support in the face of natural disasters, such as drought or intense storms. These people live mostly low-emission lives, yet will experience the most intense effects of climate change. Women, children, and indigenous communities are especially vulnerable. Gender inequality in parts of the world mean women and their children experience a greater hurdle to climate adaptation. And indigenous communities suffer the loss of natural resources and weather patterns that are foundational to their way of life, leading to lost economic opportunities.

As a part of its Sustainable Development Goals, the UN plans to eradicate extreme poverty, establish gender equality, and improve public health in developing nations. Climate stability plays a huge role in reducing poverty and improving health. An agreement at the Paris Climate Talks would be a step toward achieving even bigger social goals.

7. There’s no Plan[et] B.

We’re in this predicament because our predecessors burned fossil fuels and deforested huge areas of land. It’s hard to blame them—for the most part, they didn’t know any better. But we do. It would be tremendously shortsighted for delegates at the UN Paris Climate Talks to fail to reach an agreement. To do so would amount to a global shrug: “They can deal with it later.” Unfortunately, climate change is not an issue that can be dealt with later—delaying action could only intensify the changes we’re already feeling.

As world leaders meet at the COP21 climate conference in Paris, we would do well to turn our eyes northward. The impacts of anthropogenic climate disruption (ACD) are nowhere as evident as they are in the Arctic, where temperatures are rising at least twice as fast as the average global temperature increase.

The most obvious ramification of this has taken the form of dramatically milder winters in the far north, coupled with temperature increases in the waters of the Arctic Ocean - both of which are dramatically increasing the melting of the sea ice, which is leaving more of the water's surface exposed, thus allowing more heat to reach the ocean during the summer. This process is likely the most well-known and most important feedback loop in ACD today - and because of it, land ice and permafrost in the Arctic are melting at a record pace.

Despite the remoteness of the Arctic, the region is deeply linked to the rest of the planet: Everything from our weather, to coastal flooding, to what we eat is tied to the Arctic and the events that are rapidly changing it.

Since the cold waters of the Arctic absorb more carbon dioxide than the more temperate waters that fill most of the rest of the globe, the Arctic Ocean is far more sensitive to ocean acidification. Add to that the fact that declining summer sea ice is exposing even more of that ocean, which is allowing even more carbon dioxide from the air into the waters.

The Arctic Circle contains an area that is roughly 6 percent of the Earth's surface, yet the dramatic evidence of its impact on the rest of the planet is mounting. Some of that evidence is now taking the form of melting land ice that is generating sea level rise.

The pace of global sea level rise is increasing, largely due to what is happening in the Arctic, according to the recently released report Arctic Matters: The Global Connection to Changes in the Arctic, a report by The National Research Council of the National Academies.

According to the report, sea levels have risen about 20.3 cm (about eight inches) since 1901, but the pace of sea level rise is increasing. Plus, "Over the past two decades, sea level has risen globally at a rate of 3.1 mm (0.12 inches) per year on average. Between 2003 and 2008, melting Arctic glaciers, ice caps, and the Greenland Ice Sheet contributed 1.3 mm (0.05 inches) - more than 40 percent - of the total global sea level rise observed each year."

Additionally, for those of us living outside the Arctic Circle, it is easy to ignore the dramatic impacts ACD is having on creatures living in the Arctic.

A large number of these animals exist nowhere else on earth, and as the climate of the Arctic warms and changes, these species are in trouble. Many of them are facing the threat of extinction.

Loss of habitat and the drastic reduction of animals' hunting ranges due to receding sea ice now threaten polar bears, walruses and several species of seals, among other animals.

The landscape is changing dramatically as well, and the implications are dire not only for animals in the Arctic, but for all of us.

Endangered Species on the Brink

Dr. David Klein is a professor emeritus of wildlife management in the Institute of Arctic Biology at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks. His research currently focuses on "changes taking place in the natural and human environments at high latitudes and their relation to global climate change."

Klein told Truthout that some of the impacts of rising temperatures on Arctic ecology include "lower biological productivity, through photosynthesis by phytoplankton, in the absence of sea ice when the sun is highest in spring and early summer." Phytoplankton is a critical component of the ocean food chain, so dwindling amounts of it in seas is an extremely concerning phenomenon.

This means that native peoples who live at the edge of the sea - who have traditionally hunted and fished on, through, or within the sea ice for marine mammals, arctic cod and crabs - are now less able to do so for lack of this kind of sea life.

Additionally, many native villages are being eroded by rising sea levels, melting permafrost and increased duration of rough seas, all of which are attributed to ACD.

Also, according to Klein, since productivity in Arctic marine waters at the ice edge is much higher than when ice is absent, ice-inhabiting seals cannot breed without multi-year ice.

"These ringed seals are primary prey of polar bears, plus polar bears need sea ice in order to hunt the seals," he said. "Walrus need broken sea ice upon which they have their young and where females nurse them. Walrus dive to the bottom to feed on benthic fauna so the ice from which the walrus dive for food must be over water shallow enough for the walrus to be able to dive to the bottom in order to feed."

Hence, the lack of consistent sea ice provokes a negative chain reaction for polar bears, seals and walrus.

Dr. Steven Vavrus at the Center for Climatic Research at the University of Wisconsin, serves on the Science Steering Committee for the Study of Environmental Arctic Change, an interagency program designed to improve understanding of the processes and consequences surrounding changes in the Arctic.

Vavrus told Truthout that the Arctic is seeing "large ecological changes already." Like Klein, Vavrus pointed out how the loss of sea ice is directly affecting the habitat of polar bears, walruses and seals.  

"There has also been a 'greening' of the Arctic, with longer periods of frost-free conditions," he said. "In addition, thawing permafrost has altered the landscape by creating lakes and wetlands in some places and draining existing water bodies in other places. These changes in surface water affect the ecology of the region."

These developments are impacting both marine and terrestrial life there, he said - including interactions between species. "Polar bears are being observed to spend more time on land now, in order to compensate for the shrinking ice pack, where they normally hunt," Vavrus noted. "This will likely lead to more conflicts between bears and humans in Arctic towns and villages."

Bad News for Plankton

How do these impacts on Arctic ecosystems stretch beyond the top of the world?

Dr. Jennifer Francis is a research professor at Rutgers University's Department of Marine and Coastal Sciences whose research is focused on the Arctic. She emphasizes that any significant alterations in the Arctic environment will be felt globally.

"Arctic sea ice plays a critical role in the Arctic climate system and marine ecosystem, and as we're learning, its disappearance is having broad effects well beyond the Arctic: from weather patterns to animal migrations to ocean current systems to food webs," she told Truthout. "Its loss will be felt directly and indirectly by billions of people."

For starters, the lost sea ice very directly impacts the base of the entire Arctic food chain: plankton.

As ice melts, more sunlight enters the ocean, which alters both the timing and species of plankton living there, she explained.

"Plankton are the base of the marine food web, so anything that affects them will affect the entire marine ecosystem," Francis said. "Arctic species are adapted to a narrow range and specific annual cycle of (very cold) temperatures, so the rapid warming occurring the Arctic will challenge many endemic species. Sub-Arctic species are expected to advance northward, some of which are already being observed."

She also explained that on land we are already seeing "substantial" impacts, since the active layer of the soil which thaws during the summer is thickening, which is allowing more shrubs to spread into tundra areas that once supported only low-growing plants.

"Changing vegetation affects the animals that eat it, and transition to shrubby growth also inhibits the movement of larger animals," Francis explained.

It's clear that ACD is having a dramatic impact on the region's terrestrial life. To make things worse, the Arctic is witnessing the melting of the better part of its land mass: permafrost.

Melting Permafrost

Given what is happening in the Arctic, the term "permafrost" is likely to lose its meaning in the future.

"Defined as soil, rock, and any other subsurface earth material that exists at or below freezing for two or more consecutive years, permafrost thaws when ground temperatures increase," Arctic Matters states. "Scientists have seen declines in permafrost over the past 30 years and predict that discontinuous permafrost will likely disappear across much of the Arctic, where ground temperatures are now within 1–2° C (1.8–3.6° F) of thawing."

Trapped within the ice and permafrost of the Arctic are massive amounts of carbon that is in the forms of frozen plant matter or trapped within methane ice crystals. Melting is already releasing large amounts of this into the atmosphere, as Truthout has previously reported: another feedback loop of ACD.

Dr. Kevin Schaefer is an Arctic Research Scientist with the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colorado. He specializes in permafrost dynamics and the carbon cycle of permafrost.

"Eight-hundred gigatons of carbon is frozen into the permafrost, like plant and tree roots, and if it thaws it would double the carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere," Schaefer told Truthout.

He added that while it could take hundreds of years for this to happen, it nevertheless comprises a feedback loop that amplifies warming that is already attributable to the burning of fossil fuels.

By the year 2100, Schaefer expects 120 gigatons of carbon will be added to the atmosphere by melting permafrost; an amount the National Snow and Ice Data Center estimates would increase global temperatures by 0.29C, which is an amount that is 7.8 percent of total planetary warming.

In other words, in the context of the politically agreed-upon goal of keeping global temperatures below a 2C increase, melting permafrost will add a little over 10 percent of that amount all by itself.

"We are seeing a particularly disturbingly high rate of warming in the permafrost," Schaefer explained. "We put thermometers 20 meters into the permafrost, and it's warming up a degree per decade which is a phenomenally fast rate for permafrost. It is disturbing to see this kind of rise, we're seeing a rapid increase in temperature, and it's driven entirely by climate change."

As the permafrost thaws there will be a massive impact on the infrastructure of the Arctic and the people who live there. Ice in the permafrost is as solid as concrete, but as it thaws and melts, any infrastructure built on it will collapse, having a huge economic impact on the region - and the global economy.

Schaefer is the co-author of a study entitled "Economic impacts of carbon dioxide and methane released from thawing permafrost" that was recently published in Nature Climate Change.

"We estimated the cost impact on the global economy due to thawing permafrost to be $43 trillion," Schaefer said.

This figure represents 13 percent of the total estimated economic impact of ACD, which is $300 trillion.

"We end our paper by saying this is just another factor that says we really need to address climate change now, and not wait," Schaefer said.

His point is underscored by a study published in Geophysical Research Letters in April 2015, which showed that decaying permafrost is causing a "runaway effect," in terms of methane and stored carbon being released into the atmosphere.

Another study published in the same journal later that same month said that carbon was already entering the atmosphere "at breakneck speed."

Thus, as world leaders meet to engage in a political process around how to mitigate ACD impacts and negotiate terms around carbon dioxide emissions, the Arctic is already changing before our very eyes.

Dahr Jamail, a Truthout staff reporter, is the author of The Will to Resist: Soldiers Who Refuse to Fight in Iraq and Afghanistan (Haymarket Books, 2009, and Beyond the Green Zone: Dispatches From an Unembedded Journalist in Occupied Iraq (Haymarket Books, 2007). Jamail reported from Iraq for more than a year, as well as from Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Turkey over the last ten years, and has won the Martha Gellhorn Award for Investigative Journalism, among other awards.