Dabashi’s position is that both of these idealistic beliefs are nothing but a historical delusions. “We may, in fact, be hard pressed to find a single moment in American history when hateful racism, sexism, militarism, and xenophobia have not been entirely definitive to this American soul.” In addition, “those who view President Donald Trump as unrepresentative of American values are wrong.” In Dabashi’s view this president’s policies and practices are indeed who we are.

It is the liberals who Dabashi is particularly upset with for it is they who, in his view, have reinforced the facade of national goodness and held at bay, or perhaps simply ignored, any critical examination of this self-glorifying image. For instance, Dabashi notes that, while campaigning against Trump in the lead-up to the recent mid-term elections, Barack Obama asserted that “we [the U.S.] helped spread a commitment to certain values and principles like the rule of law and human rights and democracy and the notion of the inherent dignity and worth of every individual.”

Dabashi is having none of this. More often than not both Republicans and Democrats have “identically” supported dictators and the brutalization of entire populations. He notes that Obama is the president who “who gave billions of dollars to Israel to slaughter Palestinians with ease.” In terms of foreign policy, almost every president proceeding Obama has acted in the same culpable way, or worse.

Dabashi goes on to point out that the Democratic Party, the political party now opposing President Trump, is a “structurally corrupt” organization that is adverse to really basic change and so “it is crucial for us not to fall into the trap of thinking the enemies of the Trumpian loonies are the friends of any progressive politics.” In fact, it is Dabashi’s opinion that the United States is not, as the liberals say, “a divided country.” It is rather an “unmistakably racist, sexist, xenophobic and violent country obsessed with domestic gun violence and foreign conquest with a few pockets of wishy-washy liberal resistance here or there.”

Part II—Qualifications

Is Professor Dabashi correct? Well, in terms of foreign policy there can be no doubt that he is. Such claims that the U.S. has made a project of spreading democracy, the rule of law, and the “dignity of the individual” are historically untrue, and I agree with his reaction of disgust when he hears such unfounded claims coming out of the mouth of someone like Barack Obama.

Domestically, despite a history of “corporate corruption” in politics, the picture is more complicated. Dabashi himself suggests that this is so. He tells us that “there is nothing in the DNA or "blood" of any people, Americans included, that makes them constitutionally susceptible to latent and blatant fascism. Millions upon millions of Americans gathered around the most progressive figure in recent US politics, Bernie Sanders, in the hope of liberating themselves from the shackles of this gridlock of corrupt corporate politics.” Such efforts at “liberation” through significant progressive efforts is not confined to the Sanders movement. There was, of course, the seminal civil rights movement of the 1960s—supported at that time by many Democrats and Republicans alike.

So it is not literally true that, domestically, there is not “a single moment in history” when America has not acted from the corrupt motives of racism, sexism, etc. However, I will go along with Dabashi as far as saying that America’s progressive moments are historically the exception. That is, they are reactions to an otherwise regressive norm.

There are some additional contextualizing observations that can be made about this imbalance between the uncivilized and the civilized.

— The uncivilized attitudes and practices we find dominating United States history are certainly not uniquely American. In one form or another, they are probably universal and, in the era of the nation state, magnified by just how much power a nation possesses, how prevalent are minorities within its population, and how strong are its political and/or religious ideologies. There is always a wide range of denials and/or rationalizations that are used to turn the inexcusable into the excused.

— In every case populations are held captive by remarkably effective, long-term brainwashing convincing them of the acceptability of their culturally inbred sins. This is how the nonsense of exceptionalism and noble national souls can be so convincing.

— In most instances, it is probably the case that the leaders are as delusional true believers as the populace.

These observations only reinforce Dabashi’s bleak picture. In fact, it looks like we are all stuck in an age-old self-destructive rut. The classic conservative explanation for this is that it is due to the unchanging “evil” quality of human nature. But then how does one account for the humanitarian moments—are they somehow in defiance of human nature? That does not sound right.

Part III—Hope?

It is hard for those Americans, particularly those of color, who understand the “dark side” of the “American soul,” to lend much credence to the moments of humanitarian idealism that arrive periodically on the historical scene.

But these moments do come around, and not just in the case of the U.S. For instance, there was the remarkable effort to spread international law following the debacle that was World War II. And, one might hope against hope, that these humanitarian moments represent the accumulation of precedents that may underpin a better future.

However, as Professor Dabashi’s lament implies, history is not on our side (even now international law is being eroded away) and thus the prospect of a better future entails never-ending struggle. Nonetheless, as long as things like civil rights and international law are possibilities we can’t give up on them. I certainly don’t think that giving up is Dabashi’s intent. He just doesn’t want a bad situation denied based on delusional propaganda. Shaking loose from that propaganda is an essential first step—and perhaps, the hardest.

The CIA concluded that Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, Saudi Arabia’s de facto ruler, personally ordered the murder and dismemberment of Khashoggi. In an extraordinary statement for a U.S. president, Trump disputed the CIA findings. He saids it didn’t matter if MBS—as the Saudi ruler is known—was or was not involved in the Khashoggi killing, and that U.S.-Saudi relations are “spectacular.”

Trump’s statement reflects his narrow cultivation of business relations with MBS, while the CIA’s announcement reflects the view that that MBS has become a liability for the U.S. ruling class as a whole. The spy agency, which has deep ties to Saudi intelligence, fears that bin Salman’s reckless and impulsive actions could jeopardize the security of the whole Saudi ruling clique, endangering U.S. ruling class interests in Saudi Arabia and the entire Middle East.

For decades, Saudi Arabia has been one of the most strategic and valuable U.S. client states, and the CIA wants to keep it that way. Support for Saudi Arabia is completely bi-partisan. This partnership is drenched in blood, oil and deceit.

A review of U.S.-Saudi ties shows that Saudi Arabia anchors the U.S. empire in the Middle East. The kingdom, with the greatest oil reserves in the world, is a source of fabulous wealth for U.S. oil companies. The Saudis use their oil capacity to raise and lower world prices to further U.S. foreign policy aims. In the 1980s, for example, Ronald Reagan, got the Saudis to flood the market with oil to reduce the world price as part of an economic war against the Soviet Union.

The kingdom willingly uses religion as a cover for imperialism’s aims, exporting thousands of schools, mosques, and other centers that preach intolerance and recruit jihadists for U.S. wars. It allows the U.S. to invade other Arab countries from its territory and has funded covert CIA actions on three continents. It is treated like a cash cow for U.S. corporations and banks. It uses its vast stash of petrodollars to buy billions of dollars in Pentagon weapons at inflated prices, as well as other high-price U.S. products and services.

The country is ruled as the personal fiefdom of one family, the al-Sauds. The government is one of the most repressive and misogynistic in the world. There is no parliament or legislature. The first elections, and then only on a municipal level, took place in 2005, 73 years after the country was formed. Women were only allowed to vote in 2015. These incontestable facts go unmentioned by U.S. officials, Democrats and Republican alike.

While Washington claims to be a protector of human rights abroad, the Pentagon has pledged to send in troops if a mass movement tries to overthrow the Saudi regime.

A country birthed by imperialism

Britain and France emerged victorious after World War I. They carved Western Asia into more than 20 countries, drawing borders to weaken and dismember Arab and other indigenous national groups, and to facilitate imperialist domination.

That’s when Saudi Arabia was created. Its rulers, the al Saud and the Wahhabi families and followers merged into a political-religious alliance. The Saudi Arabia we know was established 1932, when the Saudis agreed to stop harassing other British protectorates, and to accept Britain’s definition of their borders.

Saudi Arabia’s rulers were among the first far-right Islamists assisted by imperialism. They set up an absolute monarchy and theocracy. The only constitution was the Koran as interpreted by the royal family. Slavery was legal until 1962.

Wahhabism, a form of Islam aggressively intolerant of other currents of that faith, and in opposition to secular governments, bwecame the state religion. Saudi Arabia’s control of the most important sites in Islam—Mecca and Medina– gave it prestige it had not earned in the Muslim world.

Enter U.S. oil companies and the Pentagon

In 1933, the kingdom granted Standard Oil of California (now Chevron) exclusive oil drilling rights. Huge oil reserves were discovered in 1938, promoting the formation of ARAMCO (Arabian American Oil Company) by Standard Oil and 3 other U.S. partners that later became Texaco, Exxon, and Mobil.

Saudi Arabia would soon be the country with the world’s largest known oil reserves. It would be the greatest oil producer in the world. And U.S. companies were pumping it.

Diplomatic recognition soon followed. In 1943, President Roosevelt declared the security of Saudi Arabia a “vital interest” of the United States. The U.S. opened an embassy in the country the next year.

The Pentagon soon arrived to secure the oil. In 1950, the U.S. established the Sixth Naval Fleet as a permanent military presence in the Mediterranean. In 1951, after signing the Mutual Defense Agreement, the U.S. began arming the Saudi government and training its military.

Since World War II, the U.S. empire has been built on controlling the oil flowing from the Persian Gulf. Saudi Arabia was the linchpin of this control.

Waging holy war for Washington: ‘Our faith and your iron’

Following World War II, a wave of militancy and nationalism swept the Arab world. Mass secular movements in Algeria and Iraq overthrew colonial puppets. South Yemen declared itself socialist. The Egyptian and Syrian people deposed imperialist client rule. Many of the new progressive regimes and liberation struggles were aided by the Soviet Union

The thinking of U.S. policymakers was, as Rachel Bronson puts it, “that religion could be a tool to staunch the expansion of godless communism.”

Saudi rulers happily complied. The founder of modern Saudi Arabia told U.S. Minister to Saudi Arabia, Colonel William A. Eddy, “Our faith and your iron.”

Arab anti-imperialism was especially inflamed by the 1948 destruction of Palestine and the creation of Israel. To undercut this, the Eisenhower administration set out to increase the renown of King Saud, making him ‘the senior partner of the Arab team.”

A State Department memo documents expectations that the Saudis would redirect Arab anger from Israel to the Soviet Union:

“The President said he thought we should do everything possible to stress the “holy war” aspect. [Secretary of State] Dulles commented that if the Arabs have a “holy war” they would want it to be against Israel. The President recalled, however, that Saud, after his visit here, had called on all Arabs to oppose Communism.”

In the 1950s and 1960s, the Saudis gave shelter to extremists seeking to topple nationalist governments. The kingdom started funding a network of schools and mosques that recruited jihadists for the CIA in Soviet republics with Muslim populations, and in poor Muslim countries in Asia and Africa. This included “facilitating contacts between the CIA and religious pilgrims visiting Mecca.”

The oil weapon

Some members of the Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) have advocated using oil as a weapon to force Israel to give up Palestinian land. Saudi Arabia, the biggest oil producer of OPEC, has staunchly opposed this. While calling for “separating oil from politics,” the kingdom has repeatedly raised and lowered world oil prices to advance U.S. foreign policy.

There have been exceptions. To maintain credibility among the Arab world, Saudi Arabia joined the OPEC oil embargos against the U.S. and other governments supporting Israel in the Arab-Israeli wars of 1967 and 1973. The 1967 embargo lacked OPEC consensus and was not effective. Saudi Arabia agreed to join the 1973 embargo only after the U.S. promised $2.2 billion in emergency military aid to Israel, giving it an advantage in the fighting.

The 1973 oil embargo did not cause international shortages, as many oil producers didn’t honor it. However, U.S. companies used the embargo to hold back oil supplies, raise prices, and increase profits. Occidental Petroleum’s 1973 earnings were 665 percent higher than those the year before. By the end of 1974, Exxon Corporation moved to the top of the Fortune 500 list. Four other oil companies—Texaco, Mobil, Standard Oil of California and Gulf—joined Exxon in the top seven rankings.

In 1970, the Saudis organized the “Safari Club,” a coalition of governments that conducted covert operations in Africa after the U.S. Congress restrained CIA actions. It sent arms to Somalia and helped coordinate attacks on Ethiopia, which was then aligned with the Soviet Union. It funded UNITA, a proxy of the South African apartheid government fighting in Angola.

More recently, the Saudi government likely drove down oil prices in 2014 in order to weaken the Russian and Iranian economies as punishment for supporting the Syrian government.

However, the U.S. ruling class has had it both ways with Saudi Arabia several times. While the country is a key client state of the U.S., the Saudis have also served as convenience scapegoats. When energy costs spike, causing considerable hardship among U.S. working-class families, for instance, the U.S. rulers hypocritically and suddenly start talking about the Saudi royal family, its thousands of princes, their gold bathtubs, and other extremes paid for by petrodollars.

Manufacturing a Sunni-Shia rift

In 1979, a mass revolutionary upsurge in Iran overthrew the Shah, a hated U.S.-backed dictator, establishing the Islamic Republic of Iran. The new government nationalized Iran’s huge oil reserves. That same year, an armed band of Sunni fundamentalists denounced the Saudi royal family and seized the Grand Mosque in Mecca, taking tens of thousands of religious pilgrims hostage. Hundreds of hostages were killed in the retaking of the mosque. Both events shook the Saudi rulers to their core. They responded by diverting attention to Iran. They began a religious campaign against Shia Iran, claiming they were enemies of Sunni Islam. They upped funding for Sunni jihadists worldwide, encouraging them to hate other strains of Islam, other religions, and secularism.

There was no significant conflict between Sunnis and Shias in the modern era. Saudi rulers fomented it in an attempt to turn Sunnis against the Iranian revolution. Since then, all national liberation struggles or groups fighting for some degree of independence that have Shia members have been falsely labeled as agents of Iran. These include Hezbollah–viewed by Arab progressives as the central force in the national liberation movement of Lebanon–the amalgam of forces fighting Saudi domination in Yemen, and oppressed Shia minorities in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia.

The Saudis bought out the ARAMCO oil company in 1980. But this did not make Saudi Arabia independent. The oil was still controlled by U.S. companies, especially ExxonMobil, through their ownership of oil pumping and other technology, oil tanker fleets, storage facilities, etc.

Funding the Mujahideen and the Contras

In 1978, the Marxist People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan took control of the country in a coup. It promoted land distribution and built hospitals, road, and schools in one of the most underdeveloped countries in the world. It did this with the help of the Soviet Union. The new government banned forced marriages and gave women the right to right to vote. Revolutionary Council member Anahita Ratebzad gave the new government’s view in a New Kabul Times editorial (May 28, 1978).

“Privileges which women, by right, must have are equal education, job security, health services, and free time to rear a healthy generation for building the future of the country … Educating and enlightening women is now the subject of close government attention.”

Seeking to overthrow the Soviet-aligned government, the U.S. covertly supported rural tribes that were opposed to the recent social changes, especially women’s rights and secularism. The groups attacked the new rural schools and killed women teachers. In 1979, the Soviet Union sent in troops to support the government.

From 1979-89 the Saudi kingdom recruited reactionary mujahideen forces and financed them to the tune of $3 billion. The CIA formally matched the Saudi funding.

In 1984, when the Reagan administration sought help with its secret plan to fund Contra militias and death squads in Nicaragua, the Saudi Ambassador to the U.S. pledged $1 million a month. Saudi Arabia spent a total of $32 million supporting the Contras. The contributions continued even after Congress cut off funding to the them.

U.S. would stop an internal revolution

In 1981, Ronald Reagan’s Defense Secretary Caspar W. Weinberger said that the U.S. would not let the Saudi government be overthrown, and that it would send troops to defend the Saudi regime if necessary: “We would not stand by, in the event of Saudi requests, as we did before with Iran, and allow a government that had been totally unfriendly to the United States and to the Free World to take over.” The U.S. would intervene “if there should be anything that resembled an internal revolution in Saudi Arabia, and we think that’s very remote.”

This is a regime that allows no human rights or freedom of speech; where virtually all the work was done by migrants who are super-exploited and have no chance of becoming citizens; where all women are considered legal minors and require an appointed male ‘guardian’ to supervise them and give permission for getting married, obtaining a passport, traveling, enrolling in a school; where in some court cases, a women’s testimony is worth half as much as man’s.

Saudi Arabia, 9/11, and extremism

Decades of funding extremist centers to recruit shock troops for CIA wars helped create radical Islamist groupings and individuals. Al-Qaeda’s founder, Osama Bin Laden, is a prime example. He was a Saudi citizen and a key recruiter of Saudi fighters to Afghanistan.

Fifteen out of the 19 hijackers on Sept. 1, 2001 were Saudi nationals. One might think that if the Pentagon were to retaliate against any country for the 9/11attack, it would be Saudi Arabia. Not so. While it took a few months to sort things out, the upshot was tighter security ties between Washington and Riyadh.

Instead, Washington sent troops to Afghanistan ostensibly to force the Taliban government to turn over Bin Laden, who was seeking shelter there (even though the Taliban offered to surrender Bin Laden). Ironically, another reason cited was to protect Afghani women from the Taliban that Washington installed. Many believe, however, that a more pressing reason for Wall Street and the Pentagon was that the Taliban government would not permit the U.S. to build gas and oil pipelines through Afghanistan to bring oil from Central Asia to the Arabian Sea.

In 2010,Wikileaks published secret Saudi diplomatic cables revealing that the Saudis had the dubious distinction of being the ”most significant” source of funding for Sunni terrorist groups (like al Qaeda) worldwide.

Other published cables confirm how the the Saudis cynically use religious shrines in their control. Jihadists soliciting funds slip into the country disguised as holy pilgrims. They then set up front companies to launder and receive money from government-sanctioned charities.

In 2013, under operation Timber Sycamore, Saudi Arabia and the U.S. partnered to fund, arm, and train jihadists in Syria.

The wars on Iraq

As the Soviet Union neared collapse, the Pentagon took aim at governments in the Middle East that weren’t fully under its thumb. Iraq was the first target. When Kuwait waged economic war against Iraq, including the use of slant drilling technology to penetrate the border and steal Iraqi oil, the Iraqi government sent troops into Kuwait. This was the pretext for the U.S. to form an imperialist coalition to invade Iraq. The Saudis officially requested the U.S to send in troops. The Pentagon stationed 500,000 soldiers in the kingdom, and used Saudi soil as a base to invade Iraq, and later to enforce sanctions and a no-fly zone.

The Sept. 11 attack served as a pretext to invade Iraq in 2003. The corporate media whipped up a hysteria that Saddam Hussein bore responsibility for the 9/11 attacks, even though the Iraqi government and al-Qaeda were on opposite ends of the Middle East political spectrum, had no relations, and did not cooperate. U.S. and British leaders fabricated “evidence” that Iraq had developed nuclear weapons and posed an imminent threat to the world.

Once again, Saudi Arabia proved essential. U.S. coordinated attacks on Iraq out of the Prince Sultan Air Base near Riyadh, where some 10,000 troops were stationed. U.S. Special Operations Forces operated out of the country, which tapped into oil reserves to stabilize oil prices.

Subsidizing the U.S. arms industry

For decades, the Saudis have bought large amounts of U.S. weaponry at inflated prices. These purchases peaked under the Obama administration when Saudi Arabia agreed to spend over $110 billion on U.S. weapons, aircraft, helicopters, and air-defense missiles. This made it the largest purchase of U.S. arms in history. These weapons are not for defense. The purchases are far more than is needed for any purpose for a country with 22 million people. In effect, the Saudis are subsidizing the U.S. arms industry. Most of the military equipment sits in the desert.

Of course, the arms are used when needed. When the people of neighboring Bahrain rose up against a backward and repressive regime and Saudi ally in 2011, the Saudi military rode across sovereign borders on U.S. tanks and crushed the uprising. There was no outcry from Washington.

Waging genocide in Yemen

Additionally, in 2015 Saudi Arabia started a war to dominate Yemen. The war is currently at a stalemate, with the Saudi bombings and blockade responsible for a cholera epidemic, indiscriminate civilian deaths, and starvation, in what the United Nations calls the world’s worst humanitarian crisis. Tens of thousands of children have died from disease and starvation. The war is waged with U.S. arms. U.S. advisers provide intelligence and training on the ground. Until this month, U.S. planes were refueling the Saudi planes bombing Yemen.

The U.S. has also been conducting its own operations within Yemen as part of the so-called “war on terror.” These operations include drone warfare, raids, and assassinations.

The Saudi rulers clam that the conflict in Yemen in a Sunni-Shia one. But Saudi Arabia didn’t think twice in the 1960s about backing Shiite royalist rebels in Yemen–the grandparents of today’s Houthis–against Sunni troops from Egypt supporting a progressive Yemini government.

A cash cow for U.S. corporations

Saudi Arabia continues to be a cash cow milked by U.S. businesses. The kingdom bought $20 billion in U.S. products last year, from Boeing planes to Ford cars. It recently signed a $15 billion deal with General Electric for goods and services, and put $20 billion into an investment fund run by the Blackstone Group.

U.S. banks love Saudi Arabia. The kingdom has paid $1.1 billion to western banks in fees since 2010. And truly giant bank fees are in the offing for JPMorgan Chase and Morgan Stanley, who are working with ARAMCO to take that company public.

U.S. universities and corporations grease the wheels for these giant business deals by training the kingdom’s managers and politicians, and promoting mutual interests. Many Saudi rulers begin their careers working for U.S. banks and businesses. Fahad al-Mubarak, who governed the central bank from 2011-2016 was previously chairman of Morgan Stanley in Saudi Arabia. Saudi Ministers, include those of finance and petroleum, got their degrees in the U.S.

The kingmakers in this oil-rich country have always been the princes of Wall Street. And the only god worshiped by the U.S.-Saudi unholy alliance is the almighty dollar.

Recently, after twelve years away, I returned for a couple of weeks to Chungdu and Chong Quing, which I found amazing. American patriots of the lightly read but growly sort will bristle at the thought that the Chinese may have political and economic systems superior to ours, but, well, China rises whlle the US flounders. They must be doing something right.

In terms of economic systems, the Chinese are clearly superior. China runs a large economic surplus, allowing it to invest heavily in infrastructure and in resources abroad. America runs a large deficit. China invests in China, America in the military. China’s infrastructure is new, of high quality, and growing. America’s slowly deteriorates. China has an adult government that gets things done. America has an essentially absentee Congress and a kaleidoscopically shifting cast of pathologically aggressive curiosities in the White House.

America cannot compete with a country far more populous of more-intelligent people with competent leadership and the geographic advantage of being in Eurasia. Washington’s choices are either to start a major war while it can, perhaps force the world to submit through sanctions, or resign itself to America’s becoming just another country. Given the goiterous egos inside the Beltway Bubbble, this is not encouraging.

To compare the two countries,  look at them as they are, not as we are told  they are. We are told that dictatorships, which China is, are nightmarish, brutal, do not allow the practice of religion or freedom of expression and so on. The usual examples are Pol Pot, Stalin, Hitler, Mao, and North Korea, of whom the criticisms are true. By contrast, we are told, America is envied by the world for its democracy, freedom of speech,  free press, high moral values, and freedom of religion.

This is nonsense. In fact the two countries are more similar than we might like to believe, with America converging fast on the Chinese model.

The US is at best barely democratic. Yes, every four years we have a hotly contested presidential election, full of sound and fury signifying nothing. The public has no influence over anything of importance: the wars, the military budget, immigration, offshoring of jobs, what our children are taught in school, or foreign or racial policy

We do not really have freedom of speech. Say “nigger” once and you can lose a  job of thirty years. Or criticize Jews, Isreal, blacks, homosexuals, Muslims, feminists, or transexuals. The  media strictly prohibit any criticism of these groups, or anything against abortion or in favor of gun rights, or any coverage of highly profitable wars that might turn the public against them, or corruption in Congress or Wall Street, or research on the genetics of intelligence.

Religion? Christianity is not illegal, but heavily repressed under the Constitutionally nonexistent doctrine of separation of church and state. Surveillance? onitoring of the population is intense in China and getting worse. It is hard to say just how much NSA monitors us, but America is now a land of cameras, electronic readers of license plates, recording of emails and telephone conversations. The tech giants increasingly censor political sites, and surveillance in our homes appears about to get much worse.

Here we might contemplate Lincoln’s famous dictum, “You can fool all of the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time, but you can’t fool all of the people all of the time.” Being a politician, he did not add a final clause that is the bedrock of American government, “But you can fool enough of the people enough of the time.” You don’t have to keep websites of low circulation from being politically incorrect. You just have to tell the majority, via the mass media, over and over  and over, what you wnat them to believe.

The dictatorship in China is somewhat onerous, but has little in common with the sadistic lunacy of Pol Pot’s Cambodia. In China you do not buck the government, propaganda is heavy, and communications monitored. If people accept this, as most do, they are free to start businesses, bar hop, smoke dope (which a friend there tells me is common though illegal) engage in such consumerism as they increasingly can afford and lead what an American would call normal lives. A hellhole it is not.

Socially China has a great advantage over America in that, except for the Muslims of Xinjiang, it is pretty much a Han monoculture. Lacking America’s racial diversity, its cities do not burn, no pressure exists to infantilize the schools for the benefit of incompetent minorities, racial mobs do not loot stores, and there is very little street crime.

America’s huge urban pockets of illiteracy do not exist. There is not the virulent political division that has gangs of uncontrolled Antifa  hoodlums stalking public officials. China takes education seriously, as America does not. Students study, behave as maturely as their age would suggest, and do not engage in middle-school politics.

In short, China does not appear to be in irremediable decadence. America does.

An intelligent dictatorship has crucial advantages over a chaotic pseudo-democracy. One is stability of policy. In America, we look to the next election in two, four, or six years. Businesses focus on the next quarter’s bottom line. Consequently policy flipflops. One administration has no interest in national health care, the next administration institutes it, and the third wants to eliminate it. Because policies are pulled and hauled in different directions by  special interests–in this case Big Pharma, insurance companies, the American Medical Associatiion, and so on–the result is an automobile with five wheels, an electric motor but no batteries, and a catalytic converter that doesn’t work. After twenty-four years, from Bush II until  Trump leaves, we will neither have nor not have national health care.

China’s approach to empire is primarily commercial, America’s military.  The former turns a profit without firing a shot, and the latter generates a huge loss as the US tries to garrison the world. Always favoring coercion, Washington now tries to batter the planet into submission via tarifffs, sanctions, embargos, and so on. Whether it will work, or force the rest of the world to band together against America, remains to be seen. Meanwhile the Chinese economy grows.

grows.

Contrary to a lot of guilt-tripping pleas for us all to take the bus more often to save the world, your individual choices are probably doing very little to the world's climate. The real impact comes on the industrial level, as more than 70 percent of global emissions come from just 100 companies. So you, a random American consumer, exert very little pressure here. The people who are actively cranking up the global thermostat and threatening to drown 20 percent of the global population are the billionaires in the boardrooms of these companies.

There are probably no individuals who have had a more toxic impact on public and political attitudes about climate change than the Koch brothers, and it would take an absurd amount of space to document all the money and organizations they've scraped together for that purpose. (Investigative reporter Jane Mayer's groundbreaking Dark Money does basically that.) And they have every reason to: In her book, Mayer notes that "Koch Industries alone routinely released some 24 million tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere a year."

But the scope goes far beyond merely sowing dissent and skepticism. While billionaires and the companies they run have spent years insisting that climate change either doesn't exist or is overblown, they've known the reality of the situation for a long time. PayPal cofounder Peter Thiel, for example, used to donate to the Seasteading Institute, which aimed to build floating cities in order to counteract rising sea levels. And Exxon Mobil allegedly knew about climate change in 1977, back when it was still just Exxon and about 11 years before climate change became widely talked about. Instead of acting on it, they started a decades-long misinformation campaign. According to Scientific American, Exxon helped create the Global Climate Coalition, which questioned the scientific basis for concern over climate change from the late '80s until 2002, and successfully worked to keep the U.S. from signing the Kyoto Protocol, a move that helped cause India and China, two other massive sources of greenhouse gas, to avoid signing.

Even when Republican lawmakers show flashes of willingness to get something done, they're swiftly swatted down. There are myriad examples, but one example comes via Dark Money, where Mayer describes an incident in April 2010 when Lindsey Graham briefly tried to support a cap-and-trade bill: A political group called American Solutions promptly launched a negative PR campaign against him, and Graham folded after just a few days. American Solutions, it turns out, was backed by billionaires in fossil fuel and other industries, including Trump-loving casino magnate Sheldon Adelson.

In recent years, fossil-fuel companies have tried to cast themselves as being on the same side of the general public. Just this month, Exxon pledged $1 million to fight for a carbon tax, a stopgap measure that charges a fee of $40 per ton of carbon produced and increases as production goes up. At a glance, that may seem magnanimous, but the truth is that Exxon can afford the tax. Not only is the oil and gas industry experiencing a serious boom right now, companies know that the only real solutions to climate change will hurt them even more than a measly tax.

That's largely because there is no "free market" incentive to prevent disaster. An economic environment where a company is only considered viable if it's constantly expanding and increasing its production can't be expected to pump its own brakes over something as trivial as pending global catastrophe. Instead, market logic dictates that rather than take the financial hit that comes with cutting profits, it's more reasonable to find a way to make money off the boiling ocean. Nothing illustrates this phenomenon better than the burgeoning climate-change investment industry. According to Bloomberg, investors are looking to make money off of everything from revamped food production to hotels for people fleeing increasingly hurricane-ravaged areas. A top JP Morgan Asset investment strategist advised clients that sea-level rise was so inevitable that there was likely a lot of opportunity for investing in sea-wall construction.

Even today, after literally decades of radical libertarian billionaires fostering disbelief in climate change and skepticism about the government, three out of five Americans believe climate change affects their local community. That number climbs to two-thirds on the coasts. Even the Trump administration now admits that climate change is real, but their response to it is dead-eyed acceptance. If popular support actually influenced public policy, there would have been more decisive action from the U.S. government years ago. But the fossil-fuel industry's interests are too well-insulated by the mountains of cash that have been converted into lobbyists, industry-shilling Republicans and Democrats, and misinformation. To them, the rest of the world is just kindling.

As world leaders are meeting at the COP24 in Poland to discuss how to achieve goals outlined in the 2015 Paris climate agreement, scientists and activists are raising alarm about “brutal” new research published by the Global Carbon Project on Wednesday which offers the international community a “reality check” by showing that carbon emissions will hit a record high this year.

“We’ve got a LOT of work to do folks. After flat-lining for 3 years, CO₂ emissions have now ticked up two years straight,” tweeted Penn State climate scientist Michael Mann, linking to the Washington Post‘s report on the new data. Mann also called for electing politicians willing to take the urgent actions that experts increasingly warn are needed to avert global catastrophe.

An addendum: It is no longer enough for politicians to just say the right things about climate change. They must demonstrate a commitment to meaningful actions & specific policies aimed at rapid reductions in carbon emissions. We are now officially starting to run out of time…

— Michael E. Mann (@MichaelEMann) December 5, 2018

As the Post summarized, according to the research:

Between 2014 and 2016, emissions remained largely flat, leading to hopes that the world was beginning to turn a corner. Those hopes have been dashed. In 2017, global emissions grew 1.6 percent. The rise in 2018 is projected to be 2.7 percent.

The expected increase, which would bring fossil fuel and industrial emissions to a record high of 37.1 billion tons of carbon dioxide per year, is being driven by nearly 5 percent emissions growth in China and more than 6 percent in India, researchers estimated, along with growth in many other nations throughout the world. Emissions by the United States grew 2.5 percent, while emissions by the European Union declined by just under 1 percent.

While the surge in the U.S. was driven partly by a cold winter and hot summer—which led to an increased use of heating and air conditioning—China’s rise was notably fueled by investment in coal-powered manufacturing. Researchers say reversing this trend will require climate-friendly reforms to transportation, manufacturing, and agriculture.

“This is terrible news,” Andrew Jones, co-director of Climate Interactive, told the Associated Press about the project’s findings. “Every year that we delay serious climate action, the Paris goals become difficult to meet.”

The Paris agreement—which President Donald Trump has vowed to withdraw from, making the United States the only nation on the planet that doesn’t support the international accord—aims to keep “global temperature rise this century well below 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels and to pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase even further to 1.5 degrees Celsius.”

“This is the latest and most alarming warning to the world that we are speeding towards the precipice of irrevocable climate chaos. Sadly, President Trump doesn’t care. But if he won’t act, other leaders must.”
—Wenonah Hauter, Food & Water Watch

Noting that the Trump administration has turned its back on the accord and consistently worked to roll back climate regulations in favor of polluting industries, Food & Water Watch executive director Wenonah Hauter called on elected officials at lower levels of the U.S. government to take action to curb planet-warming emissions.

“This is the latest and most alarming warning to the world that we are speeding towards the precipice of irrevocable climate chaos. Sadly, President Trump doesn’t care. But if he won’t act, other leaders must,” Hauter said in a statement, responding to the new research.

“It’s time for the governors of our country to adequately address this impending climate crisis by enacting immediate moratoria on all new fossil fuel development,” she added. “This is the bold, urgent action that the latest science calls for, and the response that our future generations are owed.”

The new data follows a World Meteorological Organization report from November that found atmospheric concentrations of the top three greenhouse gases driving global warming—carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide—have hit record high levels, which provoked warnings that “without rapid cuts in CO₂ and other greenhouse gases, climate change will have increasingly destructive and irreversible impacts on life on Earth.”

Originally published by CommonDreams.org

If you’ve been paying attention to what’s happening to the nonhuman life forms with which we share this planet, you’ve likely heard the term “the Sixth Extinction.” If not, look it up.  After all, a superb environmental reporter, Elizabeth Kolbert, has already gotten a Pulitzer Prize for writing a book with that title.

Whether the sixth mass species extinction of Earth’s history is already (or not quite yet) underway may still be debatable, but it’s clear enough that something’s going on, something that may prove even more devastating than a mass of species extinctions: the full-scale winnowing of vast populations of the planet’s invertebrates, vertebrates, and plants.  Think of it, to introduce an even broader term, as a wave of “biological annihilation” that includes possible species extinctions on a mass scale, but also massive species die-offs and various kinds of massacres.

Someday, such a planetary winnowing may prove to be the most tragic of all the grim stories of human history now playing out on this planet, even if to date it’s gotten far less attention than the dangers of climate change.  In the end, it may prove more difficult to mitigate than global warming.  Decarbonizing the global economy, however hard, won’t be harder or more improbable than the kind of wholesale restructuring of modern life and institutions that would prevent species annihilation from continuing.

With that in mind, come along with me on a topsy-turvy journey through the animal and plant kingdoms to learn a bit more about the most consequential global challenge of our time.

Insects Are Vanishing

When most of us think of animals that should be saved from annihilation, near the top of any list are likely to be the stars of the animal world: tigers and polar bears, orcas and orangutans, elephants and rhinos, and other similarly charismatic creatures.

Few express similar concern or are likely to be willing to offer financial support to “save” insects. The few that are in our visible space and cause us nuisance, we regularly swat, squash, crush, or take out en masse with Roundup.

As it happens, though, of the nearly two million known species on this planet about 70% of them are insects. And many of them are as foundational to the food chain for land animals as plankton are for marine life. Harvard entomologist (and ant specialist) E.O. Wilson once observed that “if insects were to vanish, the environment would collapse into chaos.”

In fact, insects are vanishing.

Almost exactly a year ago, the first long-term study of the decline of insect populations was reported, sparking concern (though only in professional circles) about a possible “ecological Armageddon.” Based on data collected by dozens of amateur entomologists in 63 nature reserves across Germany, a team of scientists concluded that the flying insect population had dropped by a staggering 76% over a 27-year period. At the same time, other studiesbegan to highlight dramatic plunges across Europe in the populations of individual species of bugs, bees, and moths.

What could be contributing to such a collapse? It certainly is human-caused, but the factors involved are many and hard to sort out, including habitat degradation and loss, the use of pesticides in farming, industrial agriculture, pollution, climate change, and even, insidiously enough, “light pollution that leads nocturnal insects astray and interrupts their mating.”

This past October, yet more troubling news arrived.

When American entomologist Bradford Lister first visited El Yunque National Forest in Puerto Rico in 1976, little did he know that a long-term study he was about to embark on would, 40 years later, reveal a “hyperalarming” new reality. In those decades, populations of arthropods, including insects and creepy crawlies like spiders and centipedes, had plunged by an almost unimaginable 98% in El Yunque, the only tropical rainforest within the U.S. National Forest System. Unsurprisingly, insectivores (populations of animals that feed on insects), including birds, lizards, and toads, had experienced similarly dramatic plunges, with some species vanishing entirely from that rainforest. And all of that happened before Hurricane Maria battered El Yunque in the fall of 2017.

What had caused such devastation? After eliminating habitat degradation or loss — after all, it was a protected national forest — and pesticide use (which, in Puerto Rico, had fallen by more than 80% since 1969), Lister and his Mexican colleague Andres Garcia came to believe that climate change was the culprit, in part because the average maximum temperature in that rainforest has increased by four degrees Fahrenheit over those same four decades.

Even though both scientific studies and anecdotal stories about what might be thought of as a kind of insectocide have, at this point, come only from Europe and North America, many entomologists are convinced that the collapse of insect populations is a worldwide phenomenon.

As extreme weather events — fires, floods, hurricanes — begin to occur more frequently globally, “connecting the dots” across the planet has become a staple of climate-change communication to “help the public understand how individual events are part of a larger trend.”

Now, such thinking has to be transferred to the world of the living so, as in the case of plummeting insect populations and the creatures that feed on them, biological annihilation sinks in. At the same time, what’s driving such death spirals in any given place — from pesticides to climate change to habitat loss — may differ, making biological annihilation an even more complex phenomenon than climate change.

The Edge of the Sea

The animal kingdom is composed of two groups: invertebrates, or animals without backbones, and vertebrates, which have them. Insects are invertebrates, as are starfish, anemones, corals, jellyfish, crabs, lobsters, and many more species. In fact, invertebrates make up 97% of the known animal kingdom.

In 1955, environmentalist Rachel Carson’s book The Edge of the Sea was published, bringing attention for the first time to the extraordinary diversity and density of the invertebrate life that occupies the intertidal zone.  Even now, more than half a century later, you’ve probably never considered that environment — which might be thought of as the edge of the sea (or actually the ocean) — as a forest. And neither did I, not until I read nature writer Tim McNulty’s book Olympic National Park: A Natural History some years ago. As he pointed out: “The plant associations of the low tide zone are commonly arranged in multistoried communities, not unlike the layers of an old-growth forest.” And in that old-growth forest, the starfish (or sea star) rules as the top predator of the nearshore.

In 2013, a starfish die-off — from a “sea-star wasting disease” caused by a virus — was first observed in Washington’s Olympic National Park, though it was hardly confined to that nature preserve. By the end of 2014, as Lynda Mapes reported in the Seattle Times, “more than 20 species of starfish from Alaska to Mexico” had been devastated. At the time, I was living on the Olympic Peninsula and so started writing about and, as a photographer, documenting that die-off (a painful experience after having read Carson’s exuberant account of that beautiful creature).

The following summer, though, something magical happened. I suddenly saw baby starfish everywhere. Their abundance sparked hope among park employees I spoke with that, if they survived, most of the species would bounce back. Unfortunately, that did not happen. “While younger sea stars took longer to show symptoms, once they did, they died right away,” Mapes reported. That die-off was so widespread along the Pacific coast (in many sites, more than 99% of them) that scientists considered it “unprecedented in geographic scale.”

Baby Starfish, Olympic National Park. Photo by Subhankar Banerjee, 2015.

The cause? Consider it the starfish version of a one-two punch: the climate-change-induced warming of the Pacific Ocean put stress on the animals while it made the virus that attacked them more virulent.  Think of it as a perfect storm for unleashing such a die-off.

It will take years to figure out the true scope of the aftermath, since starfish occupy the top of the food chain at the edge of the ocean and their disappearance will undoubtedly have cascading impacts, not unlike the vanishing of the insects that form the base of the food chain on land.

Concurrent with the disappearance of the starfish, another “unprecedented” die-off was happening at the edge of the same waters, along the Pacific coast of the U.S. and Canada.  It seemed to be “one of the largest mass die-offs of seabirds ever recorded,” Craig Welch wrote in National Geographic in 2015. And many more have been dying ever since, including Cassin’s auklets, thick-billed murres, common murres, fork-tailed petrels, short-tailed shearwaters, black-legged kittiwakes, and northern fulmars. That tragedy is still ongoing and its nature is caught in the title of a September article in Audubon magazine: “In Alaska, Starving Seabirds and Empty Colonies Signal a Broken Ecosystem.”

To fully understand all of this, the dots will again have to be connected across places and species, as well as over time, but the great starfish die-off is an indication that biological annihilation is now an essential part of life at the edge of the sea.

The Annihilation of Vertebrates

The remaining 3% of the kingdom Animalia is made up of vertebrates. The 62,839 known vertebrate species include fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals.

The term “biological annihilation” was introduced in 2017 in a seminal paperby scientists Geraldo Ceballos, Paul Ehrlich, and Rodolpho Dirzo, whose research focused on the population declines, as well as extinctions, of vertebrate species. “Our data,” they wrote then, “indicate that beyond global species extinctions Earth is experiencing a huge episode of population declines and extirpations.”

If anything, the 148-page Living Planet Report published this October by the World Wildlife Fund International and the Zoological Society of London only intensified the sense of urgency in their paper. As a comprehensive survey of the health of our planet and the impact of human activity on other species, its key message was grim indeed: between 1970 and 2014, it found, monitored populations of vertebrates had declined in abundance by an average of 60% globally, with particularly pronounced losses in the tropics and in freshwater systems. South and Central America suffered a dramatic loss of 89% of such vertebrates, while freshwater populations of vertebrates declined by a lesser but still staggering 83% worldwide. The results were based on 16,704 populations of 4,005 vertebrate species, which meant that the study was not claiming a comprehensive census of all vertebrate populations.  It should instead be treated as a barometer of trends in monitored populations of them.

What could be driving such an annihilatory wave to almost unimaginable levels? The report states that the main causes are “overexploitation of species, agriculture, and land conversion — all driven by runaway human consumption.” It does, however, acknowledge that climate change, too, is a “growing threat.”

When it comes to North America, the report shows that the decline is only23%. Not so bad, right? Such a statistic could mislead the public into thinking that the U.S. and Canada are in little trouble and yet, in reality, insects and other animals, as well as plants, are dying across North America in surprisingly large numbers.

From My Doorstep to the World Across Time

My own involvement with biological annihilation started at my doorstep. In March 2006, a couple of days after moving into a rented house in northern New Mexico, I found a dead male house finch, a small songbird, on the porch. It had smashed into one of the building’s large glass windows and died. At the same time, I began to note startling numbers of dead piñon, New Mexico’s state tree, everywhere in the area. Finding that dead bird and noting those dead trees sparked a desire in me to know what was happening in this new landscape of mine.

When you think of an old-growth forest — and here I don’t mean the underwater version of one but the real thing — what comes to your mind? Certainly not the desert southwest, right? The trees here don’t even grow tall enough for that.  An 800-year-old piñon may reach a height of 24 feet, not the 240-feet of a giant Sitka spruce of similar age in the Pacific Northwest. In the last decade, however, scientists have begun to see the piñon-juniper woodlands here as exactly that.

I first learned this from a book, Ancient Piñon-Juniper Woodlands: A Natural History of Mesa Verde Country. It turns out that this low-canopy, sparsely vegetated woodland ecosystem supports an incredible diversity of wildlife. In fact, as a state, New Mexico has among the greatest diversity of species in the country.  It’s second in diversity of native mammals, third in birds, and fourthin overall biodiversity. Take birds.  Trailing only California and Arizona, the state harbors 544 species, nearly half of the 1,114 species in the U.S. And consider this not praise for my adopted home, but a preface to a tragedy.

Before I could even develop a full appreciation of the piñon-juniper woodland, I came to realize that most of the mature piñon in northern New Mexico had already died. Between 2001 and 2005, a tiny bark beetle known by the name of Ips confusus had killed more than 50 million of them, about 90% of the mature ones in northern New Mexico. This happened thanks to a combination of severe drought and rapid warming, which stressed the trees, while providing a superb environment for beetle populations to explode.

Dead finch on my porch. Photo by Subhankar Banerjee, 2006.

And this, it turned out, wasn’t in any way an isolated event. Multiple species of bark beetles were by then ravaging forests across the North American West. The black spruce, the white spruce, the ponderosa pine, the lodgepole pine, the whitebark pine, and the piñon were all dying.

In fact, trees are dying all over the world. In 2010, scientists from a number of countries published a study in Forest Ecology and Management that highlights global climate-change-induced forest mortality with data recorded since 1970. In countries ranging from Argentina and Australia to Switzerland and Zimbabwe, Canada and China to South Korea and Sri Lanka, the damage to trees has been significant.

In 2010, trying to absorb the larger ecological loss, I wrote: “Hundreds of millions of trees have recently died and many more hundreds of millions will soon be dying. Now think of all the other lives, including birds and animals, that depended on those trees. What happened to them and how do we talk about that which we can’t see and will never know?”

In fact, in New Mexico, we are finally beginning to find out something about the size and nature of that larger loss.

Earlier this year, Los Alamos National Laboratory ornithologist Jeanne Fair and her colleagues released the results of a 10-year bird study on the Pajarito Plateau of New Mexico’s Jemez Mountains, where some of the worst piñon die-offs have occurred. The study shows that, between 2003 and 2013, the diversity of birds declined by 45% and bird populations, on average, decreased by a staggering 73%. Consider the irony of that on a plateau whose Spanish name, Pajarito, means “little bird.”

The piñon die-off that led to the die-off of birds is an example of connecting the dots across species and over time in one place. It’s also an example of what writer Rob Nixon calls “slow violence.” That “slowness” (even if it’s speedy indeed on the grand calendar of biological time) and the need to grasp the annihilatory dangers in our world will mean staying engaged way beyond any normal set of news cycles.  It will involve what I think of as long environmentalism.

Let’s return, then, to that dead finch on my porch. A study published in 2014 pointed out that as many as 988 million birds die each year in the U.S. by crashing into glass windows. Even worse, domestic and feral cats kill up to 2.4 billion birds and 12.3 billion small mammals annually in this country. In Australia and Canada, two other places where such feline slaughters of birds have been studied, the estimated numbers are 365 million and 200 millionrespectively — another case of connecting the dots across places and species when it comes to the various forms of biological annihilation underway on this planet.

Dead piñon where birds gather in autumn, northern New Mexico. Photo by Subhankar Banerjee, 2009.

Those avian massacres, one the result of modern architecture and our desire to see the outside from the inside, the other stemming from our urge for non-human companionship, indicate that climate change is but one cause of a planet-wide trend toward biological annihilation.  And this is hardly a contemporary story.  It has a long history, including for instance the mass killing of Arctic whales in the seventeenth century, which generated so much wealth that it helped make the Netherlands into one of the richest nations of that time. In other words, Arctic whaling proved to be an enabler of the Golden Age of the Dutch Republic, the era when Rembrandt and Vermeer made paintings still appreciated today.

The large-scale massacre and near extinction of the American bison (or buffalo) in the nineteenth century, to offer a more modern example, paved the way for white settler colonial expansion into the American West, while destroying Native American food security and a way of life. As a U.S. Army colonel put it then, “Kill every buffalo you can! Every buffalo dead is an Indian gone.”

Today, such examples have not only multiplied drastically but are increasingly woven into human life and life on this planet in ways we still hardly notice.  These, in turn, are being exacerbated by climate change, the human-induced warming of the world. To mitigate the crisis, to save life itself, would require not merely the replacement of carbon-dirty fossil fuels with renewable forms of energy, but a genuine reevaluation of modern life and its institutions. In other words, to save the starfish, the piñon, the birds, and the insects, and us in the process, has become the most challenging and significant ethical obligation of our increasingly precarious time.

Subhankar Banerjee, a TomDispatch regular, is an activist, artist, and public scholar. A professor of art and ecology, he holds the Lannan Chair at the University of New Mexico. He is currently writing a book on biological annihilation.

Copyright 2018 Subhankar Banerjee

Could it be that there are inherent evolutionary cranial/neurological deficiencies in our DNA makeup; so deeply embedded that we as a species now in this industrial age are unable to comprehend ourselves as a threat to our own future existence? Could it be that this is the reason our response to our desecration of the planet and its biosphere is so muted? Could it be that this deceitful cranial/neurological DNA side of us will lead to our painful end?

As a result of global warming, within the next one hundred years underground permafrost stores in the Artic will release massive amounts of methane. Methane is much more potent as a heat-trapping greenhouse gas than is carbon dioxide. This will exponentially compound the global warming problem.

Very few citizens of this world spend any part of their day or year thinking about this. Is there a reason? Yes there is. It can be found in a number of recent scientific observations about the genomic origins of human behavior. It is now being defined by modern psychology as Optimism bias. It describes a human brain wired for hope and optimism.

Optimism bias also permeates our economic thought. Milton Friedman demonstrated this insouciance “par excellence.” His neoliberal confidence in his theory of unfettered capitalism was stunning. Any ordinary skeptic now listening to his speeches and interviews is immediately reminded of this.

Today capital markets operate on an Optimism bias perception of a perception of a perception platform. It is a platform of naivety. Ecological reality is obscured. Any form of open discussion of adjustment is pushed into the future. But adjustment will arrive. There is inevitability to all corrections. The imaginary world of those who refuse to face reality is then exposed to the light of day. The dream becomes no more than what it ever was; a dream. Then follows the nightmare.

Is change possible? That is the question facing our 21^st century Anthropocene Age. Difficult social/political challenges face our carbon dependent civilization. The “Pulp fiction” mentality referenced above rules among the general public. Also there is an optimism bias among many of the political and economic elite. It even extends part way into the scientific community.

Many in our world society have understood the problem in all of its complexity. Many understand that we have to change the way we think. Yet, the general public remains content to carry on day by day, month by month, year by year as if there will be no adverse life-change or even inconvenience as a result of the underlying ecological forces being set in motion. There is no fear of the possibility of human extinction. There is discussion at many levels, but those discussions and the political agreements made after them fade into inconsequence. An example: The 2015 COP21 agreement in Paris. It made headlines and then has faded into the midst. The Pope’s environmental encyclical just before that; the same. Also the recent meeting in Poland.

This cognitive impairment appears in animal behavior. Have you ever seen a bear dog fearlessly chase a bear up a tree? The bear dog is unable to visualize the painful consequences of being mauled by the bear. It can only think of itself in the present tense. The bear dog assumes survival to be a “given.” It is not able to comprehend the fact that its survival is in reality not a given.

It must be a direct pain experience, not pain visualized. If somebody tells me that snakes are dangerous and can poison me and I should not be walking in the woods, only a small part of my brain, the part that focuses on future risks will glimmer. It will not hold me back from walking in the woods. Yet, if I come across a snake in the woods, nearly all of my brain will light up with activity as I process the “threat.” Nevertheless I will continue to walk in the woods. But if on a walk I get bitten, I will then be very much afraid of walking in the woods, and most certainly not in those same woods. We are all victims of this cognitive impairment. It is in our DNA. It grew out of our evolutionary need to disregard future dangers facing us. For the early hominid, each day was a new day. The future would take care of itself. It was too much of a burden to think about threats beyond those of the moment.

Over the coming decades, as we attempt to forecast the hominid societal changes that will be taking place in response to the ecological breakdown, we will need to keep in mind this cognitive impairment. We will need to recognize that the transition will most likely only take place after the pain has set in, only after the bear dog has gotten mauled ‑ after the snake has bitten larger and larger numbers of the world population and its poison has taken hold.

SOURCES

As an Addendum, here are a few words from two of the world’s greatest thinkers

John Scales Avery Interviews Dr. David Krieger

https://countercurrents.org/2018/12/05/john-scales-avery-interviews-dr-david-krieger/

Avery

Could you say something about the current wildfires in California? Is catastrophic climate change a danger comparable to the danger of a nuclear catastrophe?

Krieger

The wildfires in California have been horrendous, the worst in California history. These terrible fires are yet another manifestation of global warming, just as are the increased intensity of hurricanes, typhoons and other weather-related events.  I believe that catastrophic climate change is a danger comparable to the danger of nuclear catastrophe. A nuclear catastrophe could happen at any time. With climate change we are approaching a point from which there will be no return to normalcy and our sacred earth will become uninhabitable by humans.

And a recent NY Times article on the possibility of another Permian Triassic extinction. (This possibility is covered in my new book  Overcoming the Threat to Our Future: A Book About the Existential Threat to Our Evolutionary Future, a Book That Explains How We Can Overcome That Threat

Here is a summary of the NY Times article

The Planet has seen sudden warming before; 250 million years ago. We call it the Permian-Triassic Extinction. It wiped out almost all life. In some ways it was the planet’s worst life mass extinction. Here is our problem: It may parallel what is occurring today. Left unchecked, our future on the same course as was that worst event in geological history.

Another NY Times article

Greenhouse Gas Emissions Accelerate Like a ‘Speeding Freight Train’

Quote

“Greenhouse gas emissions worldwide are growing at an accelerating pace this year, researchers said Wednesday, putting the world on track to face some of the most severe consequences of global warming sooner than expected.”

Also the Climate Summit Poland

Quote

Sir David Attenborough quote

“The message from ‘The People’s Seat‘ at the United Nation’s COP24 climate summit in Katowice, Poland on Monday—presented by the octogenarian British naturalist Sir David Attenborough—was as succinct and simple as it was profound and terrifying: ‘If we don’t take action, the collapse of our civilizations and the extinction of much of the natural world is on the horizon.’ ”

David Anderson brings together a wide range of interests in his writings, namely; theology, history, evolutionary anthropology, philosophy, geopolitics, and economics. He has written four books. The fourth has just been published. It is about the necessary geopolitical, social, religious, economic paradigm shift needed for human survival.

Though Donald Trump’s Black Friday release of the Fourth National Climate Assessment (FNCA) completely backfired–the media relentlessly covered the report, and with devastating detail–Trump nevertheless managed to escape being held to account for what is (arguably) the Assessment’s most damning observation:

“Current trends in annual greenhouse gas emissions, globally, are consistent with RCP8.5.”

What does this mean?

RCPs, or “Representative Concentration Pathways,” are “possible scenarios” scientists use to “evaluate the implications of different climate outcomes and associated impacts throughout the 21st century,” as the FNCA notes. RCP8.5 is the highest scenario, meaning that it “represents a future where annual greenhouse gas emissions increase significantly throughout the 21st century before leveling off by 2100.”

In other words, RCP8.5 is the worst possible scenario. It describes a world in which the global annual temperature will be, by the end of this century, 9°F higher (or more) than it is today.

We cannot survive such a world.

Trump was not held to account for the FNCA’s claim–or, rather, for what the claim suggests about his pro-fossil fuel environmental policies–because it was widely overlooked in news reports and FNCA “take-aways.” Consequently, when the White House bemoaned the fact that the report was “largely based on the most extreme scenario,” the media, the administration’s critics, and even scientists typically offered the retort that the Assessment addresses other scenarios; that it was properly vetted; and, that RCP8.5 was just one possible future we are facing.

In other words, not one mention of the fact that current trends are consistent with the worst case scenario, trends to which we are contributing significantly.

According to research recently published by the Global Carbon Project, the world “is on pace to release a record 37.1 gigatons of planet-warming emissions in 2018, led in large part by China, the United States and India.” Moreover, our nation’s emissions “are expected to rise 2.5 percent this year.”

The environmental policies of the Trump administration–as well as those championed by many state governments–are nothing less than RCP8.5 in the making. In fact, given that these policies have been formulated in the context of an overwhelming scientific consensus concerning climate change, they are an intentional production of accelerating species extinction, extreme weather, climate migration, climate-related social and economic inequalities, water and food scarcity, sea level rise, ecosystem collapse, climate change related illnesses, disease, and death, ocean dead zones, and polluted air.

They are policies at war with all life on earth.

We could say, then, that RCP8.5 is here and now.

And why not? After all, that “extreme scenario” the White House complained about is not something that will appear suddenly, out of thin air, in the year 2100. No, it will unfold, inexorably, through one deregulation after another, one fossil fuel tax break and subsidy after another, one pro-coal conference and promotion after another, until the water inundates our coastal cities, the pollinators die off, the aquifers dry up, and our food supply runs out.

Of course, even as we are in the process of creating a RCP8.5 world, that world is not inevitable. It is not our fate because we can change course.

But for that to be true, not only must we resist and organize; we must also do both like its 2099.

Alycee Lane is author of The Wretched of Mother Earth: The Handbook for Living, Dying, and Nonviolent Revolution in the Midst of Climate Change Catastrophe (2018).

Originally published by CommonDreams

Every one of our policy makers of government, quasi government and private or other sectors in India says proudly about sustainable development or they plan towards achievement of sustainability of the particular programme. But their desired expectation is theoretically a mouthful word. It is perhaps a political demand, and it is only a politically correct concept because practice tells different and there is hidden weakness towards achievement of sustainability.

According to Brundtland of Commission of the United Nations, 198), “Sustainable Development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs”.  It indicates an inclusive, sustainable and resilient future for people and planet.  It consists with triple challenges- challenges of accountability, fairness and dignified living. These triple challenges have to fight with modernity, technology, and corporate exploitation. The last one is prime responsible factor because of lack of ethical sensitivity towards others- future generations.

We see that we are gradually coping with modernity based on development and progress in science and technology. Time bound need and demand of our country has been determined and all progress is to ensure a modern life comparing with the global aspect. For this purpose, Electoral reforms, police reforms, judicial reforms, and educational reforms and others are significantly going on( it may be sometimes involved with the strict agenda of the particular political parties in government).

But sustainable development is always a big question to all of us. The corporate exploitation and lack of ethical sensitivity are the prime factors of weakness of failure because we do not imagine corruption-free governance. Corporate exploitation is, we see, particularly attached to exploitation and it is a determinant factor of corruption. There is no ethical responsibility towards future generations. The corporate is trying to gain today’s profit. In India, the political patronage are desperate and open because of  personal gain. At present, a small contractor/developer has to pay cut money for work order for which this contractor/developer is allowed to do poor quality of work. The incident of sudden collapse of bridge and improper repairing & maintenance is very common. Surprisingly, our government and policy-makers have no attention of ethical responsibility because they are the patron of this.

Further, we forget that religious, state, language, caste etc, should not be allowed to interfere with progress and development

How can we dream for making in India? Where sustainability is derided on make for India?

Here, we see that our democracies are not liberal, but these are prone to corruption. Sustainable development is only possible in a liberal democracy.

Harasankar Adhikari  is a social activist

The excavation of more than 600 billion tons of toxic carbon and hydrocarbon geological remains of previous biospheres and their transfer to the atmosphere as carbon gases constitutes nothing less than insanity leading to global suicide.With estimated profitable carbon reserves in excess of 20,000 GtC (Assessing “Dangerous Climate Change”:https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0081648), including oil shale, tar sand, coal seam gas, further emissions wouldtake the atmosphere, oceans and biosphere back to early Eocene (~55-40 million years ago) and Mesozoic-like (pre-65 million years ago) greenhouse atmosphere and acid oceans conditions, during which large parts of the continents were inundated by the oceans. Most likely to survive the extreme transition over a few centuries would be grasses, some insects and perhaps some birds, descendants of the fated dinosaurs. A new evolutionary cycle would commence. Survivors of Homo sapiens may endure in the Arctic.

Figure 1.Global warming by January 2018 relative to 1951-1980

Since about 542 million years ago, acting as the lungs of the biosphere, the Earth’s atmosphere developed an oxygen-rich composition over hundreds of millions of years, allowing emergence of breathing animals.

A critical parameter in Drake’s Equation, which seeks to estimate the number of planets that host civilizations in the Milky Way galaxy, is L – the longevity of technological civilizations.Estimates of L range between a minimum of 70 years and 10,000 years, but even for the more optimistic scenarios, only a tiny fraction of such planets would exist in the galaxy at the present time.It is another question whether an intelligent species exists in this, or any other galaxy, which has brought about a mass extinction of species on the scale initiated by Homo sapiens since the mid-18th century and in particular since 1945..

The history of Earth includes six major mass extinctions defining the end of several periods, including the End-Ediacaran, Ordovician, Devonian, Permian, Jurassic and Cretaceous periods. Each of these events has been triggered either by extra-terrestrial impacts (End-Ediacaran and K-T) , massive volcanic eruptions, or methane release and related greenhouse events. Yet, with the exception of the proposed role of methanogenic bacteria for methane eruptions, the current Seventh mass extinction of species constitutes a novelty. For the first time in its history, the biosphere is in crisis through biological forcing by an advanced form of life, i.e. of a technological carbon-emitting species.

The distinct glacial-interglacial cycles of the Pleistocene (2.6 million years ago to 10,000 years ago), with rapid mean global temperature changes of up to 5 degrees Celsius rises over a few thousand years, and, in some instances shorter periods, forced an extreme adaptability of the Genus Homo. Of all the life forms on Earth, only this genus mastered fire, proceeding to manipulate the electromagnetic spectrum, split the atom and travel to other planets, a cultural change overtaking biological change.

Possessed by a conscious fear of death, craving a god-like immortality and omniscience, Homo developed the absurd faculty to simultaneously create and destroy, culminating with the demise of the atmospheric conditions that allowed its flourishing in the first place. The biological root factors which underlie the transformation of tribal warriors into button-pushing automatons capable of triggering global warming or a nuclear winter remain inexplicable.

Inherent in the enigma are little-understood top-to-base mechanisms, explored among others by George Ellis, who states: “although the laws of physics explain much of the world around us, we still do not have a realistic description of causality in truly complex hierarchical structures.” (“Physics, complexity and causality”, Nature, 435: 743, June 2005):

66 million years ago, huge asteroids hit the Earth, extinguishing the dinosaurs and vacating habitats, succeeded by the flourishing of mammals. At 56 million years ago, in the wake of a rise of atmospheric CO₂ to levels near-800 parts per million, the monkeys made appearance. About 34 million years ago, weathering of the rising Himalayan and Alps sequestered CO₂.  Earth was cooling,the Antarctic ice sheet formed and conditions on land became suitable for large, warm blooded mammals.

About 5.2 to 2.6 million years ago, in the Pliocene, with temperatures 2-3^oC and sea levels 25+/-12 meters higher than during the 15^th to 18^th centuries, the accentuation of climate oscillations saw the appearance of the genus Paranthropus andthe genus Homo. At least about one million years ago the mastering of fire by Homo Erectus, about a quarter of a millennium agothe appearance of Homo sapiens, and about 8,000 years ago the stabilization of the interglacial Holocene, saw the Neolithic and urban civilization.

Since the industrial age about 1750 and in particular from 1950, a period denoted as the Anthropocoene (cf. Steffen, Crutzen and McNeill, Ambio, 36, 614-621, 2007), deforestation and climate change led to the demise of an estimated 10,000 species per year due to destruction of habitats, ever increasing carbon pollution, acidification of the hydrosphere.

Planetcide stems back to deep recesses of the human mind, primeval fear of death leading to yearning for god-like immortality. Once excess food was produced, fear and its counterpart, violence, grew out of control, generating murderous orgies called “war“, designed to conquer death to appease the Gods.

From the Romans to the Third Reich, the barbarism of empires surpasses that of small marauding tribes. In the name of freedom they never cease to bomb peasant populations in their small fields. Only among the wretched of the Earth is true charity common, where empathy is learnt through suffering.

War is a synonym for ritual sacrifice of the young. From infanticide by rival warlord baboons, to the butchering of young children on Aztec altars, to the generational sacrifice such as in WWI, youths follow leaders blindly to the death. Hijacking the image of Christ, a messenger of justice and peace, fundamentalists promote a self-fulfilling Armageddon, while other see their future on space ships and barren planets.Nowadays a cabal of multibillionaires, executives and their political and media mouthpieces are leading the human race and much of nature to ultimate demise, with little resistance from the majority of people, either unaware or too afraid to resist the slide over the cliff.

Humans live in a realm of perceptions, dreams, myths and legends, in denial of critical existential factors (Janus: A summing up, Arthur Koestler, 1978) in a world as cruel as it is beautiful. Existentialist philosophy allows a perspective into, and a way of coping with, all that defies rational contemplation. Ethical and cultural assumptions of free will rarely govern the behavior of societies or nations, let alone an entire species.

And although the planet may not shed a tear for the demise of technological civilization, hope on the individual scale for the moment is possible. Going through the black night of the soul, members of the species may be rewarded by the emergence of a conscious dignity devoid of illusions, grateful for the glimpse at the universe for which humans are privileged for the fleeting moment:

“Having pushed a boulder up the mountain all day, turning toward the setting sun, we must consider Sisyphus happy.” (Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus, 1942)

Andrew Glikson Earth and climate scientist

(revised from “Planet Eaters”)

From August 31 this year, a part of the media and social media was abuzz with a supposed oracle of some scientists. Headings like: “We Cannot Fight Climate Change With Capitalism, Says Report,” “A dire new report reveals our capitalist economic system may not be up to the task of dealing with the climate disasters to come”, “This is how UN scientists are preparing for the end of capitalism” appeared in many news portals. “Capitalism and global sustainability are incongruous with one another, according to a recent paper for the UN’s 2019 Global Sustainable Development Report.” — wrote Grit Post. Their article with heading “UN Scientific Paper Says Capitalism Has to Die in Order for the Planet to Be Saved” was shared by portals and social media activists more than 100,000 times though the editors were quick to amend the headline on the same day [a note was added there: “EDITOR’S NOTE, 8/28/18, 3:34 PM ET: This headline was amended from “UN Scientific Paper Says Capitalism Has to Die in Order for the Planet to Be Saved” to “UN Scientific Paper Suggests Capitalism Has to Die in Order for the Planet to Be Saved.””[1]] Well known left website MR Online added that Grit Post article on September 3, which helped that article’s dissemination further[2].

But what did the UN appointed scientists actually say? Did they say or suggest that in order to fight climate change capitalism must end? Did their paper hint it? A curt answer will be: NO. Their paper, ‘Global Sustainable Development Report 2019 drafted by the Group of independent scientists’ by Paavo Järvensivu et al. of BIOS, Finland[3] is not much lengthy and not too technical; non-specialized readers can also read that. We may examine the paper to find out what the scientists said or suggested or hinted.

In the introduction the paper says: “While economists typically emphasize carbon pricing as a policy tool for tackling climate change, natural scientists and multidisciplinary environmental research groups argue for more profound political engagement and proactive governance of economic transition (Chapin et al. 2011, Steffen et al. 2018) – something akin to a global Marshall Plan (Aronoff 2017, Gore 1992).” This sentence, and also referred article like that of Kate Aronoff too [“Could a Marshall Plan for the Planet Tackle the Climate Crisis?” by Kate Aronoff November 16, 2017[4]] did not say or suggest or hint the need to cross or transcend beyond what is commonly termed as capitalism in order to tackle climate change. Moreover, it is well known and documented what a Marshall plan intended to do. As for why the Marshall Plan was designed, we can safely say that the main intentions were (1) to rejuvenate war devastated west European capitalist economies and (2) to halt the spread of communism or socialism. We shall come to what the authors meant by ‘economic transition’ measures later. Before that let us go inside the BIOS paper to look into detail.

The BIOS paper focused on four important fields or domains under the subtitle: “What needs to be done – in social and material terms?” — (1) Energy, (2) Transport, (3) Food and (4) Housing. Let us visit these points one by one. For Energy the important observation made is, “Because renewables have a lower EROI and different technical requirements, such as the need to build energy storage facilities, meeting current or growing levels of energy need in the next few decades with low-carbon solutions will be extremely difficult, if not impossible. Thus, there is considerable pressure to lower total energy use.” As regards Transport the paper suggests: “In cities, walking and biking should be emphasized and the remaining public or semi-public transport in and between cities should be largely electrified.” And the scientists made a very good and futuristic hint: “This will require changes in city planning (for example, how homes and workplaces are connected to each other and how convenient biking is), in vehicle production, in transport infrastructure such as railways, roads and charging stations, and in energy production and storage.” Regarding Food, the scientists told readers to focus on food security of countries – “Countries currently relying on significant amounts of food imports will have to attain a high degree of food self-sufficiency, with international food trade regaining its position as a crucial component of food security rather than serving as a commodity market.” And additionally, “With regard to both production and consumption practices, dairy and meat should make way for largely plant-based diets ….” As regards Housing they suggest wooden buildings reducing steel-concrete usage: “Long-lasting wood buildings, on the contrary, can provide carbon storage …. A significant shift toward using wood in construction would require changes in the entire production network, starting from forestry, in which construction uses compete for example with paper and energy uses.” But as to energy usage in houses, it only says, “In addition to manufacturing, cooling and heating are the most significant drivers of lifetime emissions from housing” which is related to “energy production” and “housing practices”.

To achieve these ends, the paper argues in the next two sections, “It is clear from these examples that strong political governance is required to accomplish the key transitions. Market-based action will not suffice – even with a high carbon price.” They then explained the inefficacy of carbon pricing or Pigouvian fees in solving this. And hence, they argued, explicitly, that a shift is needed from neo-classical to post-Keynesian economic theory and practice which has space for state interventions: “… the Post-Keynesian approach is not a priori wary of the state’s role in the market. It does not assume that markets always seek equilibrium, but maintains instead that capitalist economies tend to generate market bubbles and other crises. Markets do not lead to socially and ecologically desirable outcomes on their own, but require active political guidance.”  Then, “The Post-Keynesian approach challenges economic orthodoxy and supports sustainability transitions in the current economic and political context of Western and other similarly ordered countries. Developments in China serve as a reminder that economic theories other than neoclassical ones are already effective in the world.” Though the paper tells, “Beyond Post-Keynesian theory, there can be a variety of economic theories that support rapid materially and ecologically beneficial transitions. The key theoretical requirement is that they must enable politics to acknowledge transformational social goals and the material boundaries of economic activity”, it did not outline any of those ‘variety of economic theories that support rapid materially and ecologically beneficial transitions’, neither it suggested transcending capitalism towards socialism.

Moreover, according to the paper, there is another very useful by-product of this post-Keynesian approach: “As a practical policy tool, Post-Keynesians have suggested a so-called job guarantee …, which would ensure that all people capable and willing to work would be able to get a permanent, state-funded, and locally administered job.” In the concluding section a motivation or utility of this resulting full-employment boon is stated, “Climate change and other environmental changes threaten livelihoods across the planet and thus give cause for mass migration. It is in the interest of all countries to maintain local opportunities for a good life.”

Nevertheless, the paper warned: “One especially important constraint for rich countries is that dramatic reductions in emissions at current high levels of consumption are very challenging, if not impossible.” This purported change in wasteful commodity-fetish way of life may appear as anti-capitalist, so does the prescribed change in transport, mode of transport and etc. Moreover, there was that example: “In China, economic transitions have not been held back by the ideas of minimum state intervention or a balanced budget…”, plus that full-employment scenario of everybody having ‘permanent, state-funded, and locally administered job’.

On cursory reading these references or hints of state-intervention, state-control, indirect hint of consumption-restriction (say, cycling and electric-driven public-transport instead of fossil-fuel driven automobiles), full-employment, China, etc all these taken together may seem to suggest moving beyond capitalist society. But actually, these state controlled capitalisms, controlled to various extents, may still mean capitalism if seen from the class angle – things that matter are: who run the economy, who own the means of production (and distribution), who run the said transition and how. To Marxists, a state is never a class-neutral player and to them ‘transition’ has some concrete significance.

It will be worthwhile if in this Marx-200 year we reread how Marx and Engels viewed capitalism, socialism and transition. We may not find in Marx a precise and concrete definition of ‘capitalism’. But reading Marx we know it is a society, an economy, where commodity production, commodity exchange, money, private property of means of production, wage labour etc. categories predominantly prevail. As Engels showed, capitalist crises push capitalism to take some measures and this was behind rise of state owned/controlled enterprises within capitalism (explained in Anti Dühring). When the working-class rebels against this system and overthrows the rule, it cannot jump at once to communism – communism being the opposite of capitalism, where there will be no classes and hence no wage labour, no commodities and money, even no distinction of manual labour and mental labour, no antithesis of town and country and so on. In between capitalism and establishment of classless society there lies a long transition period. In this transition period, named ‘Dictatorship of Proletariat’ by them, many revolutionary changes will start taking place. Some important aspects of going beyond capitalism will be changes regarding ownership and control of means of production, changes in property rights and laws about inheritance, and so on – even in the Communist Manifesto, which they authored in early years of their life, we can find this. [“The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degree, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralise all instruments of production in the hands of the State, i.e., of the proletariat organised as the ruling class; and to increase the total productive forces as rapidly as possible. Of course, in the beginning, this cannot be effected except by means of despotic inroads on the rights of property, and on the conditions of bourgeois production; by means of measures, therefore, which appear economically insufficient and untenable, but which, in the course of the movement, outstrip themselves, necessitate further inroads upon the old social order, and are unavoidable as a means of entirely revolutionising the mode of production.”[5] And then 10 measures were listed there as possible steps to be taken in advanced capitalist countries, in which Point no: 1 is “Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes” and Point no: 3 is “Abolition of all rights of inheritance”.] We can learn this also from Lenin and Mao [for example, say, “Chairman Mao has pointed out: “China … Even now she practises an eight-grade wage system, distribution to each according to his work and exchange by means of money, which are scarcely different from these in the old society. What is different is that the system of ownership has changed.”” And there it was explained that the society in transition could well revert back to capitalism if the capitalist-roaders wrests the control.[6]] Obviously, those UN scientists did not hint such transition.

Whether such state-controlled capitalisms or post-Keynesian economies as hinted by those UN scientists will be able to solve the climate change problem is another matter. Scholars can investigate what might be the ecological result of essentially capitalist attitude towards nature that permeates through ‘solutions’, for example, what happens if we treat forests and trees as wood, and wood as ‘carbon-sink’, if we treat nature as collection of ‘useful substances’! It demands a detail theoretical discussion which is beyond the scope of this short article. But here we can underline one thing only, that is the said paper did not hint to go beyond capitalism. To natural scientists and to many social scientists too, the meaning of ‘capitalism’ may not be clear; as we can see clearly in the article by Kate Aronoff November 16, 2017 which the paper referred. There, Professor Kevin Anderson said in that interview, “I’ve had plenty of arguments with people that we can’t really define capitalism. Is what we see in the US the same as what we see in Sweden? Are they both capitalist? There are some elements that are clearly crossovers, but there are also big differences.” From this we can guess what ideas those scientists may bear regarding capitalism and what they may mean by going beyond capitalism. But for Marxists, it will be a gross negligence if we overlook the class question while looking at ‘state’ or ‘government’. Marxists, unlike many ‘leftists’, do not confuse welfare state or state capitalism with socialism.

By their suggestions of changes those scientists indicated that capitalism as it practised today must be changed in order to tackle climate change; but the changes they postulated did not specifically mean going beyond capitalism (towards socialism).

[A shorter version of this article appeared online in Frontier Weekly site on Nov 24.]

“We are causing the problem, but our children and grandchildren are going to suffer the consequences “

James Hansen on Climate change

Voicing concerns on deteriorating climate and rising pollution levels, children have started to register their protests. Tens of thousands of school children skipped school to march on streets demanding more action on climate change as world leaders gather at a major UN summit in Poland. (Children demand climate change action through protests and lawsuits, by Lin Taylor, December 3, 2018, www.csmonitor.com). In US and Canada too, young people are suing their governments

Learning

A short course on the theme of children and climate change introduces a children’s perspective to discussions on how to deal with this global crisis. (Children and Climate Change, provider UNICEF UN CC Learn, agora.unicef.org). This modules deals with the impact of climate change on children, empowerment of children as actors of change and how children’s resilience can be strengthened. In a book ‘ School Climate Change: How do I build a positive environment for learning? (ASCD Arias) ‘ by Peter DeWitt and Sean Slade,(www.ascd.org) the authors explain the most important aspects of school climate and how positive changes can improve academic achievement at all levels of learning. Free resources for the children of 11 – aged pupils has been made available to study and understand the concepts.( Climate Change/ Schools / Practical Action , https://practicalaction.org) The resources include lessons, posters and activities, etc.

Environment

Learning depends on classroom environment as a study from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government states, “Without airconditioning each 1°F increase in school year temperature reduces the amount learned that year by one percent”. (Too hot for learning: How Climate Change Impacts Students, by Katy Farber, June 12, 2018, momscleanairforce.org). The research provides more evidence on how climate change impacts children and would continue if action is not taken at the earliest by updating school buildings with better ventilation and air conditioning.

Urgent action needed

In 2004, the World Health Organization ( WHO) has already estimated 160 000 death and 5.5 million disability- adjusted life years lost to climate change annually, with children carrying almost 90% of this burden and 99% occurring in low and middle income countries. (McMichael et al 2004, Zhang 2007). More recent figures show that global warming is already or will be responsible for an additional 250 000 to 400 000 deaths per year between 2030 and 2050 (DARA 2012 , Hales et al 2014). Children are smaller than adults and their different and more sensitive physiological, behavioural and developmental requirements increase their exposure and long term impacts. (Children and climate change: No time for games, by Karen Kiang and David Isaacs, 3 December 2018, doctorportal.com.au). Children face the biggest climate – change related injustice – a transgression of intergenerational equity. They are more vulnerable to their surrounding environment and are less able to cope with its physical and psychological stresses and harms.

Therefore, they should be protected from the dangers of carbon emissions. Awareness of climate change from childhood helps in preparing for a safer pollution- free world as they can learn the impact from early age. A well prepared syllabus on climate change from kindergarten to high school can make children grow up with precautions to be taken to avert harmful affects of climate change by avoiding fossil fuels and using eco- friendly energy .

The writer from anywhere and everywhere supports drastic measures for clean and green environment

The time has come for the economics profession to step up to the plate and recognize that it needs to face a cruel economic fact. Here is that fact: If the profession and those who follow its dictates continue to disregard our ecological challenges, there will be for all life on this planet decade by decade enormous pain and suffering ‑ and possibly the end of our species. Many physical scientists are warning us of this. And they are telling us that irreversible tipping points will begin within the next fifty to one hundred years. Yet, there is relative silence among economists and those in the financial world. In and out of economic academia there is a willful absence of understanding that free markets without recognition of negative social and/or ecological costs are the primary cause of our problem and that without such recognition, forces are being set lose that are literally “eating up” our planet. So here Dr. Krugman is my open letter to you. As one of the most distinguished Nobel Prize economists and an op-ed writer for the NY Times, it asks for your confirmation of this writer’s (joined by many others in and out of academia) insight. It asks you to play a key role.

XXXXXXXX

Dear Dr. Krugman,

For many years now I have been reading your op-eds in the New York Times. In my mind you are one economist who speaks the truth to the weaknesses and strengths of past and present economic theory. With all due respect though; let me suggest that the time has come for economists like you to take a long hard look at a fatal flaw in the economic theory that the world has for so long accepted as having intrinsic value.

Your profession needs to begin an articulation of new theory that will meet the pressing ecological planetary challenges confronting our species.

I do not see this happening.

The architecture that grew out of the industrial revolution, on which capital markets today justify their operation, now finds its “raison d’etre” shaking under its own weight. The cold hard fact is that this architecture has not only seen its day; it is like an insidious disease working against human survival.

All around us there are indications of this failure of economic theory; from the acidification of the oceans, to the increasing CO2 in the air, from the hundreds of millions of tons of highly toxic non-biodegradable chemical waste (i.e. plastic trash that won’t disappear) on our land and in our waters, to the dying off of other forms of life on the planet. And the failure extends well beyond these observations.

The message is clear. Planet Earth is rejecting our capital market economic system. The key fault lay in the unfettered operation of the markets. They have grown to a size where they are energizing ecologically and socially destructive forces of a magnitude that has never before been seen human evolutionary history. 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 such as human greed, political dysfunction, and just plain stupidity; however, the rules under which capital markets have been operating since they took form from the beginning of the Industrial Revolution onward must take primary blame.

Your profession has failed to come forward with new ideas to stem the tide. You and those like you need to be thinking and writing and speaking about new economic theory. It is not happening. Physical scientists throughout the world have been describing the ecological problems with great clarity; it is time for economists to offer economic solutions.

Boiled down into a few words; our resource exploitive capital market system needs to be transformed into a constrained yet incentive directed market system emphasizing the equitable and humanistic provision of both the material and psychological needs of all humanity. The long lasting functionality of all the earth’s resources to meet these needs must take on the highest priority. Every element of today’s energy intensive market driven consumerism must be made to meet this planetary survival/functionality test.

How can we mechanistically achieve this? Negative external costs and positive incentives must be built into every investment decision. And these costs and incentives must be applied to every human economic activity; from the mine to the chemistry lab to the assembly line to the opera house to the athletic field to the hospital, at the time of entry into the market. Economic outcomes with negative social and/or ecological value must be recognized. Negative Externalities need to be measured and priced in up front so as to discourage, temper, or at the extreme eliminate investment.

Every investment decision must be internally priced to reflect its socially constructive or destructive outcome. Croplands, grasslands, forests, fisheries, inorganic resources; all of the earth’s natural resources, must be internally priced so as to prevent their exploitation and damage to the planet.

In our present world, none this is happening on a broad enough scale to make a difference. We see punitive cigarette and liquor taxes and some others like them, but across the board, any form of build-in of “negative external” cost reflecting ecological considerations is almost nil. The chemical industry rules over the agricultural. Disincentives/Incentives in vital areas like energy are being very poorly handled or not at all. The most simple questions such as; is this or that delivering real worth to society and to the health of the planet are being avoided. As I am certain you are aware; some progress is being made in northern Europe, but I am sure you will agree with me that on a world scale it is insignificant.

Humanity is crying out for an entirely new form of economic/monetary theory. Social/political 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. The mindset of our species remains in social political economic gridlock. Your economics profession remains notably silent, content on using its advanced theories for trading purposes and further planetary exploitation, but not for the above.

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

Will our great and great-great grandchildren find themselves at the bottom of Dante’s inferno with no escape? There is this possibility. The time has come for humanity to recognize that unless it can change the way it prices what it desires to consume, the biblical prophecy of the end of times may very well prove to be self-fulfilling.

Respectfully yours,

David Anderson

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

He has written four books. The fourth is about a necessary geo political, social, religious, economic paradigm shift for human survival.

See: http://www.inquiryabraham.com/new-book.html

Over his career he was an international risk manager and senior executive at several of America’s premier multinational institutions. During that period he became increasingly aware of the underlying cultural, institutional and religious causes of past and present civilizational dysfunction and conflict.

We either keep fossil fuels in the ground, or all of us are going to fry. So essentially posits still another new blockbuster study on climate change, this one just published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Our fossil-fuel industrial economy, the study details, has made for the fastest climate changes our Earth has ever seen.

“If we think about the future in terms of the past, where we are going is uncharted territory for human society,” notes the study lead author Kevin Burke from the University of Wisconsin.

“In the roughly 20 to 25 years I have been working in the field,” adds another researcher on the effort, Wisconsin’s John Williams, “we have gone from expecting climate change to happen, to detecting the effects, and now, we are seeing that it’s causing harm,” as measured in property damage and deaths, in intensified flooding and fires.

The last time climate on Earth saw nearly as drastic and rapid a climate shift, scientists relate in another new study published in the journal Science, came some 252 million years ago, and that shift unfolded over the span of a few thousand years. Those span of time saw the extinction of 96 percent of the Earth’s ocean species and almost as devastating a loss to terrestrial creatures.

Other scientific studies over this past year — most notably an October report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that warned we have a dozen years to avert a climate catastrophe — have made similarly alarming observations and together provided an apt backdrop for this month’s United Nations climate change talks in Poland.

Researchers had hoped these talks would stiffen the global resolve to seriously address the climate change crisis. But several nations had other ideas. The United States, Russia, Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait have all refused to officially “welcome” the findings of the blue-ribbon Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, essentially throwing a huge monkey-wrench into efforts to mobilize a fitting global response.

What unites these four recalcitrant nations? One key characteristic stands out: The United States, Russia, Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait all just happen to rate among the world’s most unequal nations.

Just a coincidence? Absolutely not, suggests a new analysis from the Civil Society Equity Review coalition, a worldwide initiative that counts in its ranks the Climate Action Network International, 350.org, and scores of other global, regional, and national groups committed to averting a climatic cataclysm.

Limiting global warming to 1.5°C — the goal the global scientific community now sees as the absolute least we ought to be striving to achieve — will require, the Civil Society Equity Review analysis explains, “disruptive shifts” and heighten “anxieties about loss, displacement, and social insecurity.”

People will tolerate these disruptions, the analysis continues, but only if they believe that everyone is sharing in the sacrifice, the wealthy and powerful included.

Over recent years, environmental policy makers have essentially defined the wealthy at the level of the nation state. The focus has been on the relationships between wealthy nations and developing nations still struggling to amass wealth. Wealthier nations, the climate change consensus has come to understand, have a responsibility to help poorer nations meet the environmental challenges ahead.

But the new Civil Society Equity Review report — After Paris: Inequality, Fair Shares, and the Climate Emergency — argues that we need to expand our focus from inequality between nations to inequality within nations as well.

“If we are to achieve the critical outcome of limiting global temperature rise to 1.5°C, the wealthy (individuals and companies) in all nations must take the greatest action to both reduce their own emissions and to support the global transition,” After Parisstresses. “The wealthy must not be able to hide from their responsibilities.”

The more unequal a wealthy society, the greater the power of the rich — and the corporations they run — to do that hiding. And the inequality their wealth engenders, After Paris adds, also has “much to do with the dark character of the current political moment,” the growing levels of xenophobia and racism that make serious environmental aid from developed to developing nations ever less likely.

“The greatest effort of the climate transition must ultimately be borne by the people who have the wealth,” the new Civil Society Equity Review analysis concludes, “and this has to be true both within countries and between them.”

The wealthy and their corporations, left to their own devices, would for the most part rather not bear any sort of significant transitional sacrifice. How best to get them to meet their responsibilities — and help lighten the “dark character of the current political moment”? One stab at that necessary political project has just come from Thomas Piketty, the world’s most famous inequality analyst, and over 50 other economists, historians, and former elected leaders from throughout Europe.

These thought-leaders have issued a “manifesto for the democratization of Europe” that sees the current institutions of the European Union stuck in “a technocratic impasse” that benefits only the rich. The manifesto — published earlier this month in seven major European media outlets — calls for a new European Assembly with an $800-billion annual budget financed via increased taxes on corporate profits and the income and wealth of the EU’s most affluent, plus a new tax on carbon emissions.

Steps like these could help ease the way for a serious offensive against the ravages of climate change. But many more such steps will be necessary, as Basav Sen, the climate justice director at the Institute for Policy Studies, reminds us.

“Addressing climate change effectively and justly,” sums up Sen, “requires us to transform the unjust social and economic systems that gave us climate change in the first place.”

Sam Pizzigati co-edits Inequality.org and also contributes regularly to OurFuture.org. His most recent book: The Rich Don’t Always Win: The Forgotten Triumph over Plutocracy that Created the American Middle Class, 1900-1970 (Seven Stories Press).

The chart shows the Greenhouse Gas emissions trajectories of the world’s 4 largest countries. We can devise and predict and hope for a politics in each of these regions to match both what needs to be done and what is going on in each.

INDIA

India is an important country for making projections about the trajectory of global climate change because it is the last of the 10 largest countries in the world with per person carbon dioxide emissions of less than 2 tonnes per year.

India has an installed electricity generation capacity of around 335’000 MW and carbon dioxide emissions are around 2.4 billion tCO2e per year, that is around 1.8 tCO2e per person per year.

But is this low enough assuming all the world was at this low level? No.

So if even India has to reduce its per capita emissions, how much more drastic the adjustments of all the other large countries are going to have to be over the next 12 years.

THE WORLD’S SINKS

The ocean sinks sequester 11 billion tCO2e and soils and forests on land take up around 7.5 billion tCO2e. This total of around 18.5 billion tCO2e sink capacity today is exceeded wildly by global emissions from land use change and fossil fuel production. Today 5 billion tCOe are emitted every year from soil disturbance, deforestation and wrong agricultural practices, and around 36 billion tCO2e emitted annually from fossil fuel extraction, production, consumption and distribution. If we leave land use emissions as they are, 22.5 billion tCO2e from fossil fuel use every year are excess and must be reduced. And the annual emissions are still rising, we should not forget.

THE PERMITTED SOURCES OF GREENHOUSE GASES

To reduce these emissions we must first make all land on Earth a sink, that is reducing land use change emissions from 5 billion tCO2e per year to at least nil and ideally making more forests and thus more sink capacity, thus making land a net sink. This means nationalising land and taking up a a policy of full employment for all workers in agro-forestry. Secondly we should reduce the production and consumption of fossil fuels from a total of around 72 billion boe or 36 billion tCO2e to not only what the sinks can currently bear, which would be around 18.5 billion tCO2e per year, but because of the uncertainties surrounding the feedback effects in the biosphere due to accelerating warming, to what a pessimistic scenario suggests they might bear, which is emissions of no more than 10 billion tCO2e per year.

If the world population is 10 billion this would be the 1 tCO2e per person per year. That is around 2 barrels of oil equivalent or around 2-3 MWh of electricity or a mix of the two. We cannot count on renewable energy installation rates because at the present rate it will take nearly 400 years to switch all of commercial energy to renewable and there is no way to speed up the process. In any case renewable energy cannot be a sustitute for petroleum so many of the machines in the global economy will no longer be useful.

WHAT IS TO BE DONE – POLITICS IN INDIA

Thus even India’s low emissions are not low enough for a equal sharing of the world’s atmospheric resource. Nonetheless, with a more equitable, just, fraternal and last but not least agro-forestry oriented national land use policy, India should be in the best position of all countries to adjust to and stay at a 1 tCO2e per person per year economy. This is the big question for India. Currently 1% of Indian own 50% of the wealth, and so they are responsible for 50% of the carbon dioxide emissions, that is to say they also hog 50% of the country’s energy. To change from this state of affairs, which is a capitalist GDP growth driven model, to an egalitarian model, India needs the kind of socialist world revolution being demanded by the yellow vests and others elsewhere let alone by India’s constitution. Indian workers should not be burned to death by employers for asking for back wages, but instead there should be a national commitment to full employment, nationalisation of land, nationalisation of money and equitable sharing of commercial energy for basic needs and collective production of basic needs. (1)

WHAT IS TO BE DONE IN THE USA – WHRE ARE THE REVOLUTIONARY FORCES?

But what about the USA? This is the country that is most to blame for the problem of climate change, because it has the military industrial complex that defends it with war and bombs and nuclear arsenals.

As far as the USA is concerned, the story is of a different dimension all together from the one in India, but it has only a quarter of India’s population and has more agricultural land per person so the solutions are easier to find, – if, and this is the big if, there is a political revolution in that country.

The USA’s emission and money contraction trajectory is much steeper than India’s. In the USA the per person emissions have to come down from 16.5 tCO2e per capita per year to the globally equitable sustainable level of 1 tCO2e per person per year by 2030, that is a 94% contraction; and like their carbon emissions, their economy and especially their asset values must contract by 94% too. That is the global sustainability task by 2030 for the USA.

The USA will also have to have the most revolutionary of revolutions to address the 1% who own half of the world’s stocks and shares.

Today the global GDP is around USD 87 trillion, so global GDP would have to come back down to 1990s levels of the 1990s, which is quite manageable, except that it has to be distributed justly on the basis of population both within and between nations; but as said much more importantly the global 10% who own the world’s stocks and shares worth USD 317 trillion in this world must loose all their wealth; and of all countries the USA will be most changed after this revolution; in other words the stocks and shares value of the global economy and the US economy in particular will have to be zero by 2030. There cannot be private stocks and shares in a sustainable world, there can only be nationally owned money and production and energy shared equitably across the population. The industrial military complex of the United States of America, (in which, by the way, the Pentagon could not account for USD 21 trillion in the period 1998 to 2015, USD 6.5 trillion in 2015 alone) would have to become zero, nil, nothing, it would have to cease to exist.

CHINA

China needs a revolution to reign in its expansion globally. It’s money system too must change from a capitalist money system based on debt and interest and therefore one of growth and asset creation for the 1% to a socialist one of nationally owned debt free money and no stock exchanges. Other countries namely the other 7 largest nations and the rest have similar challenges at various levels of emissions and national inequality and exit from global capitalism.

EUROPE

The revolutions in Europe we are seeing today with the yellow vests protests are for no other reason than that such sustainability transformations of the global economy to 1 tCO2e per person per year by 2030 cannot be done without a just, equitable, free and nationalised system of land and money.

The emission reductions in the EU have been the most dramatic of anywhere in the world barring Russia over the last two decades. So their sustainability revolution has started first. The demand in Europe is for a raise from EUR 1000 per month for the unemployed to 10% more. Is this affordable in the world? Yes.

AN EQUITABLE SUSTAINABLE INCOME AND BUYING CAPACITY FOR ALL WORKERS AND CHILDREN

In the global economy 1 tonne of carbon dioxide equivalent (tCO2e), (the equivalent of around 2 barrels of oil equivalent (boe) or around 3 Megawatthours (MWh) of electricity) enables a country to circulate around USD 5000 of local currency at home.

Thus, – and substituting the notoriously wrong growth-hinged economic measure namely GDP, with a static money measure namely M3, which is the amount of money in the economy, a country can afford to have USD 5’000 per person per year of M3 for 1 tCO2e of sources of GHGs. M3 is the measure of broad money in the economy including all money circulating in the form of private and public debt, coins and notes.

The answer to the yellow vests protesting for an equitable sustainability transition in the world, therefore, is, by 2030 you will be allowed USD 5000 per person per year, so you will be okay, because you have between 3 and 4 people in your families and so your income and expenditure may be more or less what you are asking for, maybe even a bit more. Make the revolution in this context.

Thus assuming that all money in the world is nationalised and made debt free, and assuming a world population of 10 billion, and assuming the 1 tCO2e energy budget per person per year, one is therefore creating a no-growth global economy of an annual income and expenditure per person of 5000 USD per annum; – a USD 50 trillion global economy shared equally between all people and global GHG emissions of 10 billion tCO2e also shared equally.

The sustainability revolution thus has to be an equity revolution. It involves amongst other things abolishing the salary differentials between manual and managerial labour, whites and blacks, men and women, forward and backward castes, adults and children, and most important rentiers and workers. Rentiers would be abolished along with the corporations they own.

CONCLUSION

To sum up, the triple challenge faced by countries separately and also together is

a) convert money into Government owned debt free money to get out of the growth trap set by banks that create money by lending at interest;

b) liquidate all stocks and share assets to zero value;

c) nationalise land and along with it all fossil fuels, and restrict production, consumption and circulation to around 20 billion barrels of oil equivalent per year i.e. 10 billion tCO2e produced, distributed and consumed by all nations equitably on the basis of population with an equitably allocated new energy backed currency unit for buying and selling these fossil fuels.

This is the world economic order we must get to by 2030 according to the IPCC. Hence the world revolution that yellow vests and others are calling for. Abolish the US industrial-military complex owned by the 1%. Hence the urgent need in India not only to cancel landowner debt, but to nationalise land and give all workers and children a USD 5000 per year income to go to school, work as agricultural workers, grow agro-forests and feed and house all the living beings in India. The same goes for all other countries of the world. (2)

References

(1) India’s social and economic crisis cannot be better displayed than in this terribly haunting story by Shashikala VP in the Patriot: http://thepatriot.in/2018/12/13/dont-spare-the-men-who-burnt-me/

(2) For some more details with more focus on the political revolution needed in the USA see yesterday’s article: https://countercurrents.org/2018/12/14/gilets-jaunes-dont-forget-your-anti-americanism/

Anandi Sharan was born in Switzerland, lives in Bangalore and last year worked in Araria District Bihar, India. She works on trying to find the best money system to help people adapt to climate change especially in India.

Here are some excerpts from a proposed Earth Constitution. The full text can be found on the following link:

English

1 Preamble

• Realizing that Humanity today has come to a turning point in history and that we are on the threshold of an new world order which promises to usher in an era of peace, prosperity, justice and harmony;

• Aware of the interdependence of people, nations and all life;

• Aware that man’s abuse of science and technology has brought Humanity to the brink of disaster through the production of horrendous weaponry of mass destruction and to the brink of ecological and social catastrophe;

• Aware that the traditional concept of security through military defense is a total illusion both for the present and for the future;

• Aware of the misery and conflicts caused by ever increasing disparity between rich and poor;

• Conscious of our obligation to posterity to save Humanity from imminent and total annihilation;

• Conscious that Humanity is One despite the existence of diverse nations, races, creeds, ideologies and cultures and that the principle of unity in diversity is the basis for a new age when war shall be outlawed and peace prevail; when the earth’s total resources shall be equitably used for human welfare; and when basic human rights and responsibilities shall be shared by all without discrimination;

• Conscious of the inescapable reality that the greatest hope for the survival of life on earth is the establishment of a democratic world government;

We, citizens of the world, hereby resolve to establish a world federation to be governed in accordance with this constitution for the Federation of Earth.

2 Article 1 – Broad functions of the World Government

The broad functions of the Federation of Earth shall be

1. To prevent war, secure disarmament, and resolve territorial and other disputes which endanger peace and human rights.

2. To protect universal human rights, including life, liberty, security, democracy, and equal opportunities in life.

3. To obtain for all people on earth the conditions required for equitable economic and social development and for diminishing social differences.

4. To regulate world trade, communications, transportation, currency, standards, use of world resources, and other global and international processes.

5. To protect the environment and the ecological fabric of life from all sources of damage, and to control technological innovations whose effects transcend national boundaries, for the purpose of keeping Earth a safe, healthy and happy home for humanity.

6. To devise and implement solutions to all problems which are beyond the capacity of national governments, or which are now or may become of global or international concern or consequence.

3 Article 2 – Basic Structure of World Federation and World Government

1. The Federation of Earth shall be organized as a universal federation, to include all nations and all people, and to encompass all oceans, seas and lands of Earth, inclusive of non-self governing territories, together with the surrounding atmosphere.

2. The World Government for the Federation of Earth shall be non-military and shall be democratic in its own structure, with ultimate sovereignty residing in all the people who live on Earth.

3. The authority and powers granted to the World Government shall be limited to those defined in this Constitution for the Federation of Earth, applicable to problems and affairs which transcend national boundaries, leaving to national governments jurisd iction over the internal affairs of the respective nations but consistent with the authority of the World Government to protect universal human rights as defined in this World Constitution.

4. The basic direct electoral and administrative units of the World Government shall be World Electoral and Administrative Districts. A total of not more than 1000 World Electoral and Administrative Districts shall be defined, and shall be nearly equal i n population, within the limits of plus or minus ten percent.

5. Contiguous World Electoral and Administrative Districts shall be combined as may be appropriate to compose a total of twenty World Electoral and Administrative Regions for the following purposes, but not limited thereto: for the election or appointmen t of certain world government officials; for administrative purposes; for composing various organs of the world government as enumerated in Article IV; for the functioning of the Judiciary, the Enforcement System, and the Ombudsmus, as well as for the fun ctioning of any other organ or agency of the World Government.

6. The World Electoral and Administrative Regions may be composed of a variable number of World Electoral and Administrative Districts, taking into consideration geographic, cultural, ecological and other factors as well as population.

7. Contiguous World Electoral and Administrative Regions shall be grouped together in pairs to compose Magna-Regions.

8. The boundaries for World Electoral and Administrative Regions shall not cross the boundaries of the World Electoral and Administrative Districts, and shall be common insofar as feasible for the various administrative departments and for the several or gans and agencies of the World Government. Boundaries for the World Electoral and Administrative Districts as well as for the Regions need not conform to existing national boundaries, but shall conform as far as practicable.

9. The World Electoral and Administrative Regions shall be grouped to compose at least five Continental Divisions of the Earth, for the election or appointment of certain world government officials, and for certain aspects of the composition and function ing of the several organs and agencies of the World Government as specified hereinafter. The boundaries of Continental Divisions shall not cross existing national boundaries as far as practicable. Continental Divisions may be composed of a variable numbe r of World Electoral and Administrative Regions.

4 Article 3 – Organs of the World Government

The organs of the World Government shall be

1. The World Parliament.

2. The World Executive.

3. The World Administration.

4. The Integrative Complex.

5. The World Judiciary.

6. The Enforcement System.

7. The World Ombudsmus.

5 Article 4 – Grant of Specific Powers to the World Government

The powers of the World government to be exercised through its several organs and agencies shall comprise the following:

1. Prevent wars and armed conflicts among the nations, regions, districts, parts and peoples of Earth.

2. Supervise disarmament and prevent re-armament; prohibit and eliminate the design, testing, manufacture, sale, purchase, use and possession of weapons of mass destruction, and prohibit or regulate all lethal weapons which the World Parliament may decide.

3. Prohibit incitement to war, and discrimination against or defamation of conscientious objectors.

4. Provide the means for peaceful and just solutions of disputes and conflicts among or between nations, peoples, and/or other components within the Federation of Earth.

5. Supervise boundary settlements and conduct plebiscites as needed.

6. Define the boundaries for the districts, regions and divisions which are established for electoral, administrative, judicial and other purposes of the World Government.

7. Define and regulate procedures for the nomination and election of the members of each House of the World Parliament, and for the nomination, election, appointment and employment of all World Government officials and personnel.

8. Codify world laws, including the body of international law developed prior to adoption of the world constitution, but not inconsistent therewith, and which is approved by the World Parliament.

9. Establish universal standars for weights, measurements, accounting and records.

10. Provide assistance in the event of large scale calamities, including drouth, famine, pestilence, flood, earthquake, hurricane, ecological disruptions and other disasters.

11. Guarantee and enforce the civil liberties and the basic human rights which are defined in the Bill of Rights for the Citizens of Earth which is made a part of this World Constitution under Article 12.

12. Define standards and promote the worldwide improvement in working conditions, nutrition, health, housing, human settlements, environmental conditions, education, economic security, and other conditions defined under Article 13 of this World Constituti on.

13. Regulate and supervise international transportation, communications, postal services, and migrations of people.

14. Regulate and supervise supra-national trade, industry, corporations, businesses, cartels, professional services, labor supply, finances, investments and insurance.

15. Secure and supervise the elimination of tariffs and other trade barriers among nations, but with provisions to prevent or minimize hardship for those previously protected by tariffs.

16. Raise the revenues and funds, by direct and/or indirect means, which are necessary for the purposes and activities of the World Government.

17. Establish and operate world financial, banking, credit and insurance institutions designed to serve human needs; establish, issue and regulate world currency, credit and exchange.

18. Plan for and regulate the development, use, conservation and re-cycling of the natural resources of Earth as the common heritage of Humanity; protect the environment in every way for the benefit of both present and future generations.

19. Create and operate a World Economic Development Organization to serve equitably the needs of all nations and people included within the World Federation.

20. Develop and implement solutions to transnational problems of food supply, agricultural production, soil fertility, soil conservation, pest control, diet, nutrition, drugs and poisons, and the disposal of toxic wastes.

21. Develop and implement means to control population growth in relation to the lifesupport capacities of Earth, and solve problems of population distribution.

22. Develop, protect, regulate and conserve the water supplies of Earth; develop, operate and/or coordinate transnational irrigation and other water supply and control projects; assure equitable allocation of trans- national water supplies, and protect ag ainst adverse trans-national effects of water or moisture diversion or weather control projects within national boundaries.

23. Own, administer and supervise the development and conservation of the oceans and sea-beds of Earth and all resources thereof, and protect from damage.

24. Protect from damage, and control and supervise the uses of the atmosphere of Earth.

25. Conduct inter-planetary and cosmic explorations and research; have exclusive jurisdiction over the Moon and over all satellites launched from Earth.

26. Establish, operate and/or coordinate global air lines, ocean transport systems, international railways and highways, global communication systems, and means for interplanetary travel and communications; control and administer vital waterways.

27. Develop, operate and/or coordinate transnational power systems, or networks of small units, integrating into the systems or networks power derived from the sun, wind, water, tides, heat differentials, magnetic forces, and any other source of safe, eco logically sound and continuing energy supply.

28. Control the mining, production, transportation and use of fossil sources of energy to the extent necessary to reduce and prevent damages to the environment and the ecology, as well as to prevent conflicts and conserve supplies for sustained use by suc ceeding generations.

29. Exercise exclusive jurisdiction and control over nuclear energy research and testing and nuclear power production, including the right to prohibit any form of testing or production considered hazardous.

30. Place under world controls essential natural resources which may be limited or unevenly distributed about the Earth. Find and implement ways to reduce wastes and find ways to minimize disparities when development or production is insufficient to supply everybody with all that may be needed.

31. Provide for the examination and assessment of technological innovations which are or may be of supranational consequence, to determine possible hazards or perils to humanity or the environment; institute such controls and regulations of technology as may be found necessary to prevent or correct widespread hazards or perils to human health and welfare.

32. Carry out intensive programs to develop safe alternatives to any technology or technological processes which may be hazardous to the environment, the ecological system, or human health and welfare.

33. Resolve supra-national problems caused by gross disparities in technological development or capability, capital formation, availability of natural resources, educational opportunity, economic opportunity, and wage and price differentials. Assist the processes of technology transfer under conditions which safeguard human welfare and the environment and contribute to minimizing disparities.

34. Intervene under procedures to be defined by the World Parliament in cases of either intra-state violence and intra-state problems which seriously affect world peace or universal human rights.

35. Develop a world university system. Obtain the correction of prejudicial communicative materials which cause misunderstandings or conflicts due to differences of race, religion, sex, national origin or affiliation.

36. Organize, coordinate and/or administer a voluntary, non-military World Service Corps, to carry out a wide variety of projects designed to serve human welfare.

37. Designate as may be found desirable an official world language or official world languages.

38. Establish and operate a system of world parks, wild life preserves, natural places, and wilderness areas.

39. Define and establish procedures for initiative and referendum by the Citizens of Earth on matters of supra-national legislation not prohibited by this World Constitution.

40. Establish such departments, bureaus, commissions, institutes, corporations, administrations, or agencies as may by needed to carry out any and all of the functions and powers of the World Government.

41. Serve the needs of humanity in any and all ways which are now, or may prove in the future to be, beyond the capacity of national and local governments.

6 Article 5 – The World Parliament

Sec. A – Functions and Powers of the World Parliament

The functions and powers of the World Parliament shall comprise the following:

1. To prepare and enact detailed legislation in all areas of authority and jurisdiction granted to the World Government under Article IV of this World Constitution.
2. To amend or repeal world laws as may be found necessary or desirable.

3. To approve, amend or reject the international laws developed prior to the advent of World Government, and to codify and integrate the system of world law and world legislation under the World Government.

4. To establish such regulations and directions as may be needed, consistent with this world constitution, for the proper functioning of all organs, branches, departments, bureaus, commissions, institutes, agencies or parts of the World Government.

5. To review, amend and give final approval to each budget for the World Government, as submitted by the World Executive; to devise the specific means for directly raising funds needed to fulfill the budget, including taxes, licenses, fees, globally acco unted social and public costs which must be added into the prices for goods and services, loans and credit advances, and any other appropriate means; and to appropriate and allocate funds for all operations and functions of the World Government in accordance with approved budgets, but subject to the right of the Parliament to revise any appropriation not yet spent or contractually committed.

6. To create, alter, abolish or consolidate the departments, bureaus, commissions, institutes, agencies or other parts of the World Government as may be needed for the best functioning of the several organs of the World Government, subject to the specific provisions of this World Constitution.

7. To approve the appointments of the heads of all major departments, commissions, offices, agencies and other parts of the several organs of the World Government, except those chosen by electoral or civil service procedures.

8. To remove from office for cause any member of the World Executive, and any elective or appointive head of any organ, department, office, agency or other part of the World Government, subject to the specific provisions in this World Constitution concerning specific offices.

9. To define and revise the boundaries of the World Electoral and Administrative Districts, the World Electoral and Administrative Regions and Magna Regions, and the Continental Divisions.

10. To schedule the implementation of those provisions of the World Constitution which require implementation by stages during the several stages of Provisional World Government, First Operative Stage of World Government, Second Operative Stage of World Government, and Full Operative Stage of World Government, as defined in Articles XVII and XIX of this World Constitution.

11. To plan and schedule the implementation of those provisions of the World Constitution which may require a period of years to be accomplished.

Sec. B – Composition of the World Parliament

1. The World Parliament shall be composed of three houses, designated as follows:

• The House of Peoples, to represent the people of Earth directly and equally;

• The House of Nations, to represent the nations which are joined together in the Federation of Earth; and a • House of Counsellors with particular functions to represent the highest good and best interests of humanity as a whole.

1. All members of the World Parliament, regardless of House, shall be designated as Members of the World Parliament.

Sec. C – The House of Peoples

1. The House of Peoples shall be composed of the peoples delegates directly elected in proportion to population from the World Electoral and Administrative Districts, as defined in Article 2-4.

2. Peoples delegates shall be elected by universal adult suffrage, open to all persons of age 18 and above.

3. One peoples delegate shall be elected from each World Electoral and Administrative District to serve a five year term in the House of Peoples. Peoples delegates may be elected to serve successive terms without limit. Each peoples delegate shall have one vote.

4. A candidate for election to serve as a peoples delegate must be at least 21 years of age, a resident for at least one year of the electoral district from which the candidate is seeking election, and shall take a pledge of service to humanity.

Sec. D – The House of Nations

1. The House of Nations shall be composed of national delegates elected or appointed by procedures to be determined by each national government on the following basis:

(a) One national delegate from each nation of at least 100,000 population, but less than 10,000,000 population.

(b) Two national delegates from each nation of at least 10,000,000 population, but less than 100,000,000 population.

(c) Three national delegates from each nation of 100,000,000 population or more.

1. Nations of less than 100,000 population may join in groups with other nations for purposes of representation in the House of Nations.

2. National delegates shall be elected or appointed to serve for terms of five years, and may be elected or appointed to serve successive terms without limit. Each national delegate shall have one vote.

3. Any person to serve as a national delegate shall be a citizen for at least two years of the nation to be represented, must be at least 21 years of age, and shall take a pledge of service to humanity.

Sec. E – The House of Counsellors

1. The House of Counsellors shall be composed of 200 counsellors chosen in equal numbers from nominations submitted from the twenty World Electoral and Administrative Regions, as defined in Article II-5 and II-6, ten from each Region.

2. Nominations for members of the House of Counsellors shall be made by the teachers and students of universities and colleges and of scientific academies and institutes within each world electoral and administrative region. Nominees may be persons who are off campus in any walk of life as well as on campus.

3. Nominees to the House of Counsellors from each World Electoral and Administrative Region shall, by vote taken among themselves, reduce the number of nominees to no less than two times and no more than three times the number to be elected.

4. Nominees to serve as members of the House of Counsellors must be at least 25 years of age, and shall take a pledge of service to humanity. There shall be no residence requirement, and a nominee need not be a resident of the region from which nominated or elected.

5. The members of the House of Counsellors from each region shall be elected by the members of the other two houses of the World Parliament from the particular region.

6. Counsellors shall be elected to serve terms of ten years. One-half of the members of the House of Counsellors shall be elected every five years. Counsellors may serve successive terms without limit. Each Counsellor shall have one vote.

Sec. F – Procedures of the World Parliament

1. Each house of the World Parliament during its first session after general elections shall elect a panel of five chairpersons from among its own members, one from each of five Continental Divisions. The chairpersons shall rotate annually so that each w ill serve for one year as chief presiding officer, while the other four serve as vice-chairpersons.

2. The panels of Chairpersons from each House shall meet together, as needed, for the purpose of coordinating the work of the Houses of the World Parliament, both severally and jointly.

3. Any legislative measure or action may be initiated in either House of Peoples or House of Nations or both concurrently, and shall become effective when passed by a simple majority vote of both the House of Peoples and of the House of Nations, except in those cases where an absolute majority vote or other voting majority is specified in this World Constitution.

4. In case of deadlock on a measure initiated in either the House of Peoples or House of Nations, the measure shall then automatically go to the House of Counsellors for decision by simple majority vote of the House of Counsellors, except in the cases where other majority vote is required in this World Constitution. Any measure may be referred for decision to the House of Counsellors by a concurrent vote of the other two houses.

5. The House of Counsellors may initiate any legislative measure, which shall then be submitted to the other two houses and must be passed by simple majority vote of both the House of Peoples and House of Nations to become effective, unless other voting majority is required by some provision of this World Constitution.

6. The House of Counsellors may introduce an opinion or resolution on any measure pending before either of the other two houses; either of the other houses may request the opinion of the House of Counsellors before acting upon a measure.

7. Each house of the World Parliament shall adopt its own detailed rules of procedure, which shall by consistent with the procedures set forth in this World Constitution, and which shall be designed to facilitate coordinated functioning of the three houses.

8. Approval of appointments by the World Parliament or any house thereof shall require simple majority votes, while removals for cause shall require absolute majority votes.

9. After the full operative stage of World Government is declared, general elections for members of the World Parliament to the House of Peoples shall be held every five years. The first general elections shall be held within the first two years following the declaration of the full operative stage of World Government. Until the full operative stage of World Government is declared, elections for members of the World Parliament to the House of Peoples may be conducted whenever feasible in relation to the campaign for ratification of this World Constitution.

10. Regular sessions of the House of Peoples and House of Nations of the World Parliament shall convene on the second Monday of January of each and every year.

11. Each nation, according to its own procedures, shall appoint or elect members of the World Parliament to the House of Nations at least thirty days prior to the date for convening the World Parliament in January.

12. The House of Peoples together with the House of Nations shall elect the members of the World Parliament to the House of Counsellors during the month of January after the general elections. For its first session after general elections, the House of Co unsellors shall convene on the second Monday of March, and thereafter concurrently with the other two houses.

13. Bi-elections to fill vacancies shall be held within three months from occurrence of the vacancy or vacancies.

14. The World Parliament shall remain in session for a minimum of nine months of each year. One or two breaks may be taken during each year, at times and for durations to be decided by simple majority vote of the House of Peoples and House of Nations sitting jointly.

15. Annual salaries for members of the World Parliament of all three houses shall be the same, except for those who serve also as members of the Presidium and of the Executive Cabinet.

16. Salary schedules for members of the World Parliament and for members of the Presidium and of the Executive Cabinet shall be determined by the World Parliament.

Figure 1: Dr. Roger Kotila, President, Democratic World Federalists and Earth Federation activist.

A freely downloadable book

A new 418-page book entitled “A World Federation” may be downloaded and circulated gratis from the following link:

http://eacpe.org/app/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/A-World-Federation-by-John-Scales-Avery.pdf

John Scales Avery is a theoretical chemist at the University of Copenhagen. He is noted for his books and research publications in quantum chemistry, thermodynamics, evolution, and history of science. His 2003 book Information Theory and Evolution set forth the view that the phenomenon of life, including its origin, evolution, as well as human cultural evolution, has its background situated in the fields of thermodynamics, statistical mechanics, and information theory. Since 1990 he has been the Chairman of the Danish National Group of Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs. During his tenure The Pugwash Movement won a nobel peace prize.  Between 2004 and 2015 he also served as Chairman of the Danish Peace Academy. He founded the Journal of Bioenergetics and Biomembranes, and was for many years its Managing Editor. He also served as Technical Advisor to the World Health Organization, Regional Office for Europe (1988-1997).

There could be no more consequential decision than launching atomic weapons and possibly triggering a nuclear holocaust. President John F. Kennedy faced just such a moment during the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 and, after envisioning the catastrophic outcome of a U.S.-Soviet nuclear exchange, he came to the conclusion that the atomic powers should impose tough barriers on the precipitous use of such weaponry. Among the measures he and other global leaders adopted were guidelines requiring that senior officials, not just military personnel, have a role in any nuclear-launch decision.

That was then, of course, and this is now. And what a now it is! With artificial intelligence, or AI, soon to play an ever-increasing role in military affairs, as in virtually everything else in our lives, the role of humans, even in nuclear decision-making, is likely to be progressively diminished. In fact, in some future AI-saturated world, it could disappear entirely, leaving machines to determine humanity’s fate.

This isn’t idle conjecture based on science fiction movies or dystopian novels. It’s all too real, all too here and now, or at least here and soon to be. As the Pentagon and the military commands of the other great powers look to the future, what they see is a highly contested battlefield — some have called it a “hyperwar” environment — where vast swarms of AI-guided robotic weapons will fight each other at speeds far exceeding the ability of human commanders to follow the course of a battle. At such a time, it is thought, commanders might increasingly be forced to rely on ever more intelligent machines to make decisions on what weaponry to employ when and where. At first, this may not extend to nuclear weapons, but as the speed of battle increases and the “firebreak” between them and conventional weaponry shrinks, it may prove impossible to prevent the creeping automatization of even nuclear-launch decision-making.

Such an outcome can only grow more likely as the U.S. military completes a top-to-bottom realignment intended to transform it from a fundamentally small-war, counter-terrorist organization back into one focused on peer-against-peer combat with China and Russia. This shift was mandated by the Department of Defense in its December 2017 National Security Strategy. Rather than focusing mainly on weaponry and tactics aimed at combating poorly armed insurgents in never-ending small-scale conflicts, the American military is now being redesigned to fight increasingly well-equipped Chinese and Russian forces in multi-dimensional (air, sea, land, space, cyberspace) engagements involving multiple attack systems (tanks, planes, missiles, rockets) operating with minimal human oversight.

“The major effect/result of all these capabilities coming together will be an innovation warfare has never seen before: the minimization of human decision-making in the vast majority of processes traditionally required to wage war,” observed retired Marine General John Allen and AI entrepreneur Amir Hussain. “In this coming age of hyperwar, we will see humans providing broad, high-level inputs while machines do the planning, executing, and adapting to the reality of the mission and take on the burden of thousands of individual decisions with no additional input.”

That “minimization of human decision-making” will have profound implications for the future of combat. Ordinarily, national leaders seek to control the pace and direction of battle to ensure the best possible outcome, even if that means halting the fighting to avoid greater losses or prevent humanitarian disaster. Machines, even very smart machines, are unlikely to be capable of assessing the social and political context of combat, so activating them might well lead to situations of uncontrolled escalation.

It may be years, possibly decades, before machines replace humans in critical military decision-making roles, but that time is on the horizon. When it comes to controlling AI-enabled weapons systems, as Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis put it in a recent interview, “For the near future, there’s going to be a significant human element. Maybe for 10 years, maybe for 15. But not for 100.”

Why AI?

Even five years ago, there were few in the military establishment who gave much thought to the role of AI or robotics when it came to major combat operations. Yes, remotely piloted aircraft (RPA), or drones, have been widely used in Africa and the Greater Middle East to hunt down enemy combatants, but those are largely ancillary (and sometimes CIA) operations, intended to relieve pressure on U.S. commandos and allied forces facing scattered bands of violent extremists. In addition, today’s RPAs are still controlled by human operators, even if from remote locations, and make little use, as yet, of AI-powered target-identification and attack systems. In the future, however, such systems are expected to populate much of any battlespace, replacing humans in many or even most combat functions.

To speed this transformation, the Department of Defense is already spending hundreds of millions of dollars on AI-related research. “We cannot expect success fighting tomorrow’s conflicts with yesterday’s thinking, weapons, or equipment,” Mattis told Congress in April. To ensure continued military supremacy, he added, the Pentagon would have to focus more “investment in technological innovation to increase lethality, including research into advanced autonomous systems, artificial intelligence, and hypersonics.”

Why the sudden emphasis on AI and robotics? It begins, of course, with the astonishing progress made by the tech community — much of it based in Silicon Valley, California — in enhancing AI and applying it to a multitude of functions, including image identification and voice recognition. One of those applications, Alexa Voice Services, is the computer system behind Amazon’s smart speaker that not only can use the Internet to do your bidding but interpret your commands. (“Alexa, play classical music.” “Alexa, tell me today’s weather.” “Alexa, turn the lights on.”) Another is the kind of self-driving vehicle technology that is expected to revolutionize transportation.

Artificial Intelligence is an “omni-use” technology, explain analysts at the Congressional Research Service, a non-partisan information agency, “as it has the potential to be integrated into virtually everything.” It’s also a “dual-use” technology in that it can be applied as aptly to military as civilian purposes. Self-driving cars, for instance, rely on specialized algorithms to process data from an array of sensors monitoring traffic conditions and so decide which routes to take, when to change lanes, and so on. The same technology and reconfigured versions of the same algorithms will one day be applied to self-driving tanks set loose on future battlefields. Similarly, someday drone aircraft — without human operators in distant locales — will be capable of scouring a battlefield for designated targets (tanks, radar systems, combatants), determining that something it “sees” is indeed on its target list, and “deciding” to launch a missile at it.

It doesn’t take a particularly nimble brain to realize why Pentagon officials would seek to harness such technology: they think it will give them a significant advantage in future wars. Any full-scale conflict between the U.S. and China or Russia (or both) would, to say the least, be extraordinarily violent, with possibly hundreds of warships and many thousands of aircraft and armored vehicles all focused in densely packed battlespaces. In such an environment, speed in decision-making, deployment, and engagement will undoubtedly prove a critical asset. Given future super-smart, precision-guided weaponry, whoever fires first will have a better chance of success, or even survival, than a slower-firing adversary. Humans can move swiftly in such situations when forced to do so, but future machines will act far more swiftly, while keeping track of more battlefield variables.

As General Paul Selva, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, toldCongress in 2017,

“It is very compelling when one looks at the capabilities that artificial intelligence can bring to the speed and accuracy of command and control and the capabilities that advanced robotics might bring to a complex battlespace, particularly machine-to-machine interaction in space and cyberspace, where speed is of the essence.”

Aside from aiming to exploit AI in the development of its own weaponry, U.S. military officials are intensely aware that their principal adversaries are also pushing ahead in the weaponization of AI and robotics, seeking novel ways to overcome America’s advantages in conventional weaponry. According to the Congressional Research Service, for instance, China is investing heavily in the development of artificial intelligence and its application to military purposes. Though lacking the tech base of either China or the United States, Russia is similarly rushing the development of AI and robotics. Any significant Chinese or Russian lead in such emerging technologies that might threaten this country’s military superiority would be intolerable to the Pentagon.

Not surprisingly then, in the fashion of past arms races (from the pre-World War I development of battleships to Cold War nuclear weaponry), an “arms race in AI” is now underway, with the U.S., China, Russia, and other nations (including Britain, Israel, and South Korea) seeking to gain a critical advantage in the weaponization of artificial intelligence and robotics. Pentagon officials regularly cite Chinese advances in AI when seeking congressional funding for their projects, just as Chinese and Russian military officials undoubtedly cite American ones to fund their own pet projects. In true arms race fashion, this dynamic is already accelerating the pace of development and deployment of AI-empowered systems and ensuring their future prominence in warfare.

Command and Control

As this arms race unfolds, artificial intelligence will be applied to every aspect of warfare, from logistics and surveillance to target identification and battle management. Robotic vehicles will accompany troops on the battlefield, carrying supplies and firing on enemy positions; swarms of armed drones will attack enemy tanks, radars, and command centers; unmanned undersea vehicles, or UUVs, will pursue both enemy submarines and surface ships. At the outset of combat, all these instruments of war will undoubtedly be controlled by humans. As the fighting intensifies, however, communications between headquarters and the front lines may well be lost and such systems will, according to military scenarios already being written, be on their own, empowered to take lethal action without further human intervention.

Most of the debate over the application of AI and its future battlefield autonomy has been focused on the morality of empowering fully autonomous weapons — sometimes called “killer robots” — with a capacity to make life-and-death decisions on their own, or on whether the use of such systems would violate the laws of war and international humanitarian law. Such statutes require that war-makers be able to distinguish between combatants and civilians on the battlefield and spare the latter from harm to the greatest extent possible. Advocates of the new technology claim that machines will indeed become smart enough to sort out such distinctions for themselves, while opponents insist that they will never prove capable of making critical distinctions of that sort in the heat of battle and would be unable to show compassion when appropriate. A number of human rights and humanitarian organizations have even launched the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots with the goal of adopting an international ban on the development and deployment of fully autonomous weapons systems.

In the meantime, a perhaps even more consequential debate is emerging in the military realm over the application of AI to command-and-control (C2) systems — that is, to ways senior officers will communicate key orders to their troops. Generals and admirals always seek to maximize the reliability of C2 systems to ensure that their strategic intentions will be fulfilled as thoroughly as possible. In the current era, such systems are deeply reliant on secure radio and satellite communications systems that extend from headquarters to the front lines. However, strategists worry that, in a future hyperwar environment, such systems could be jammed or degraded just as the speed of the fighting begins to exceed the ability of commanders to receive battlefield reports, process the data, and dispatch timely orders. Consider this a functional definition of the infamous fog of war multiplied by artificial intelligence — with defeat a likely outcome. The answer to such a dilemma for many military officials: let the machines take over these systems, too. As a report from the Congressional Research Service puts it, in the future “AI algorithms may provide commanders with viable courses of action based on real-time analysis of the battle-space, which would enable faster adaptation to unfolding events.”

And someday, of course, it’s possible to imagine that the minds behind such decision-making would cease to be human ones. Incoming data from battlefield information systems would instead be channeled to AI processors focused on assessing imminent threats and, given the time constraints involved, executing what they deemed the best options without human instructions.

Pentagon officials deny that any of this is the intent of their AI-related research. They acknowledge, however, that they can at least imagine a future in which other countries delegate decision-making to machines and the U.S. sees no choice but to follow suit, lest it lose the strategic high ground. “We will not delegate lethal authority for a machine to make a decision,” then-Deputy Secretary of Defense Robert Work told Paul Scharre of the Center for a New American Security in a 2016 interview. But he added the usual caveat: in the future, “we might be going up against a competitor that is more willing to delegate authority to machines than we are and as that competition unfolds, we’ll have to make decisions about how to compete.”

The Doomsday Decision

The assumption in most of these scenarios is that the U.S. and its allies will be engaged in a conventional war with China and/or Russia. Keep in mind, then, that the very nature of such a future AI-driven hyperwar will only increase the risk that conventional conflicts could cross a threshold that’s never been crossed before: an actual nuclear war between two nuclear states. And should that happen, those AI-empowered C2 systems could, sooner or later, find themselves in a position to launch atomic weapons.

Such a danger arises from the convergence of multiple advances in technology: not just AI and robotics, but the development of conventional strike capabilities like hypersonic missiles capable of flying at five or more times the speed of sound, electromagnetic rail guns, and high-energy lasers. Such weaponry, though non-nuclear, when combined with AI surveillance and target-identification systems, could even attack an enemy’s mobile retaliatory weapons and so threaten to eliminate its ability to launch a response to any nuclear attack. Given such a “use ’em or lose ’em” scenario, any power might be inclined not to wait but to launch its nukes at the first sign of possible attack, or even, fearing loss of control in an uncertain, fast-paced engagement, delegate launch authority to its machines. And once that occurred, it could prove almost impossible to prevent further escalation.

The question then arises: Would machines make better decisions than humans in such a situation? They certainly are capable of processing vast amounts of information over brief periods of time and weighing the pros and cons of alternative actions in a thoroughly unemotional manner. But machines also make military mistakes and, above all, they lack the ability to reflect on a situation and conclude: Stop this madness. No battle advantage is worth global human annihilation.

As Paul Scharre put it in Army of None, a new book on AI and warfare, “Humans are not perfect, but they can empathize with their opponents and see the bigger picture. Unlike humans, autonomous weapons would have no ability to understand the consequences of their actions, no ability to step back from the brink of war.”

So maybe we should think twice about giving some future militarized version of Alexa the power to launch a machine-made Armageddon.

Michael T. Klare, a TomDispatch regular, is the five-college professor emeritus of peace and world security studies at Hampshire College and a senior visiting fellow at the Arms Control Association. His most recent book is The Race for What’s Left. His next book, All Hell Breaking Loose: Climate Change, Global Chaos, and American National Security, will be published in 2019.

Copyright 2018 Michael T. Klare

Humans are an interesting species … instead of seeing eye-to-eye, they see eye-to-nose.  They focus on the present and themselves, particularly where their comfort is concerned, no matter how dire the predictions for the future.

Although they are now over, such has been evident at the climate change talks in Katowice, Poland.  An effort to mandate the Paris agreement, in light of the dire 1.5C report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, has been stymied repeatedly by Saudi Arabia, the US, Russia and Kuwait.  Particularly disturbed are island countries like the Maldives that are literally disappearing with sea-level rise.  Unbelievably, one of the last spats was on the word “welcoming” as in welcoming the IPCC 1.5C report.  It has been changed to “welcomes the timely completion of … ” in the final draft thereby not endorsing its conclusions, stark warnings or more ambitious goals like the 1.5C limit on global warming.

The serious sticking point is Article 6.  It deals with country plans and is of special concern to the poorer countries promised financial support.  But to obtain it Measuring, Reporting and Verification (MRV) of carbon emissions reduction is sought by donor agencies and private sector groups.

Thus Global Green Growth Institute (GGGI) is an international organization promoting balanced economic growth, that is without harming the environment.  It can help prepare a low emissions development strategy by assisting in developing viable MRV schemes.   It has for Colombia, Fiji and Mongolia, and is pursuing the same for others like Laos, Mozambique, Nepal and Senegal among others,  Sri Lanka, a vulnerable island nation, has developed MRV systems for energy and transportation but requires help in other areas like agriculture, animal husbandry and industrial emissions.

The terms of financial support are crucial for such countries to fulfill their obligations.  The ‘haves’ have to be generous and the need for verification is clear, as are necessary incentives to bring in the private sector voluntarily.  Though a compromise, the new draft text walks the extra mile for developing countries.

Meanwhile Brazil, heavily invested in the old clean development mechanism, dug in its heels on carbon markets and trade (also Article 6).  No settlement.  It wants to retain carbon credits earned under the old regime.  On this one COP24 kicked the can down the road to 2019.  Negotiations are not going to be any easier with Jair Bolsonaro the incoming president.  But that’s in the future.  Right now it’s time to get back home for the holidays.

While they roll out the new “rulebook” in Katowice, there is some good news of developments in clean solar energy and carbon capture:

A solar tower absorbs heat form an array of rotating mirrors (heliostats) focusing the sun’s rays on to it.  Inside this solar absorber is a special salt solution.  Heated to high temperatures, it, in turn, heats water in an adjacent boiler converting it into steam to drive turbines and generate electricity.

The highly corrosive salts in the solution damage the towers.  However, as reported in Renewable Energy, researchers have now found a way to add another five years or so to tower life.  Silicon Carbide is presently the preferred containment material.  The researchers discovered that adding Aluminum Nitride to make a composite not only improved conductivity performance but resisted corrosion more effectively.

The second good thing:  In the UK, large-scale Carbon Capture and Usage (CCUS) is to be implemented in fuel-intensive industries like steel, cement production and oil refining, and a new solvent-based CO2 Capture Technology appears promising.  The captured gas can be recycled into blast furnaces, used to bind concrete, recover oil, and used in pharmaceutical processes and even decaffeinating coffee.  As Dr Fatih Birol, executive director of the International Energy Agency observed, “Without CCUS as part of the solution, reaching our international climate goals is practically impossible.”

The first carbon capture and usage project of this type is lined up for the 2020s with scaling up into the other industries scheduled for the 2030s.  There were 102 carbon capture projects globally at the end of 2017 with 53 in the US.  The nature and scope of these can be ascertained through an interactive map displayed by Third Way.

All in all not the worst news for the planet, and a resuscitated Paris agreement albeit with many compromises.  As noted in the beginning, such is the nature of us humans.  COP24 provides the tools but no mandate; it is up to governments to decide whether to use them.

Dr Arshad M Khan (http://ofthisandthat.org/index.html) is a former Professor based in the U.S. whose comments over several decades have appeared in a wide-ranging array of print and internet media.  His work has been quoted in the U.S. Congress and published in the Congressional Record. 

What kind of world do we want for the future? We want a world where war is abolished as an institution, and where the enormous resources now wasted on war are used constructively.

We want a world where a stable population of moderate size lives in comfort and security, free from fear of hunger or unemployment.

We want a world where peoples of all countries have equal access to resources, and an equal quality of life. We want a world with a new economic system where the prices of resources are not merely the prices of the burglar’s tools needed to crack the safes of nature, a system which is not designed to produce unlimited growth, but which aims instead at meeting the real needs of the human community in equilibrium with the environment.

We want a world of changed values, where extravagance and waste are regarded as morally wrong; where kindness, wisdom and beauty are admired; and where the survival of other species than our own is regarded as an end in itself, not just a means to our own ends. In our reverence for the intricate beauty and majesty of nature, and our respect for the dignity and rights of other humans, we can feel united with the great religious and philosophical traditions of mankind, and with the traditional wisdom of our ancestors.

Collectively, we can choose the future world that we want. We must join haands, and work together to create it. No one can achieve the urgently needed reforms alone, but together, we can do it!

In the world as it is, 1.7 trillion US dollars are spent each year on armaments.

In the world as it could be, the enormous sums now wasted on war would be used to combat famine, poverty, illiteracy, and preventable disease. .

In the world as it is, population is increasing so fast that it doubles every thirty-nine years. Most of this increase is in the developing countries, and in many of these, the doubling time is less than twenty-five years. Famine is already present, and it threatens to become more severe and widespread in the future.

In the world as it could be, population would be stabilized at a level that could be sustained comfortably by the world’s food and energy resources. Each country would be responsible for stabilizing its own population.

In the world as it is, the nuclear weapons now stockpiled are sufficient to kill everyone on earth several times over. Nuclear technology is spreading, and many politically unstable countries have recently acquired nuclear weapons or may acquire them soon. Even terrorist groups or organized criminals may acquire such weapons, and there is an increasing danger that they will be used.

In the world as it could be, both the manufacture and the possession of nuclear weapons would be prohibited. The same would hold for other weapons of mass destruction.

In the world as it is, 40% of all research funds are used for projects related to armaments.

In the world as it could be, research in science and engineering would be redirected towards solving the urgent problems now facing humanity, such as the development of better methods for treating tropical diseases, new energy sources, and new agricultural methods. An expanded UNESCO would replace national military establishments as the patron of science and engineering.

In the world as it is, gross violations of human rights are common. These include genocide, torture, summary execution, and imprisonment without trial.

In the world as it could be, the International Human Rights Commission would have far greater power to protect individuals against violations of human rights.

In the world as it is, armaments exported from the industrial countries to the Third World amount to a value of roughly 17 billion dollars per year. This trade in arms increases the seriousness and danger of conflicts in the less developed countries, and diverts scarce funds from their urgent needs.

In the world as it could be, international trade in arms would be strictly limited by enforcible laws.

In the world as it is, an estimated 10 million children die each year from starvation or from diseases related to malnutrition.

In the world as it could be, the international community would support programs for agricultural development and famine relief on a much larger scale than at present.

In the world as it is, diarrhoea spread by unsafe drinking water kills an estimated 6 million children every year.

In the world as it could be, the installation of safe and adequate water systems and proper sanitation in all parts of the world would have a high priority and would be supported by ample international funds.

In the world as it is, malaria, tuberculosis, AIDS, cholera, schistosomiasis, typhoid fever, typhus, trachoma, sleeping sickness and river blindness cause the illness and death of millions of people each year. For example, it is estimated that 200 million people now suffer from schistosomiasis and that 500 million suffer from trachoma, which often causes blindness. In Africa alone, malaria kills more than a million children every year.

In the world as it could be, these preventable diseases would be controlled by a concerted international effort. The World Health Organization would be given sufficient funds to carry out this project.

In the world as it is, the rate of illiteracy in the 25 least developed countries is 80%. The total number of illiterates in the world is estimated to be 800 million.

In the world as it could be, the international community would aim at giving all children at least an elementary education. Laws against child labour would prevent parents from regarding very young children as a source of income, thus removing one of the driving forces behind the population explosion. The money invested in education would pay economic dividends after a few years.

In the world as it is, there is no generally enforcible system of international law, although the International Criminal Court is a step in the right direction.

In the world as it could be, the General Assembly of the United Nations would have the power to make international laws. These laws would be binding for all citizens of the world community, and the United Nations would enforce its laws by arresting or fining individual violators, even if they were heads of states. However, the laws of the United Nations would be restricted to international matters, and each nation would run its own internal affairs according to its own laws.

In the world as it is, each nation considers itself to be “sovereign”. In other words, every country considers that it can do whatever it likes, without regard for the welfare of the world community. This means that at the international level we have anarchy.

In the world as it could be, the concept of national sovereignty would be limited by the needs of the world community. Each nation would decide most issues within its own boundaries, but would yield some of its sovereignty in international matters.

In the world as it is, the system of giving “one nation one vote” in the United Nations General Assembly means that Monaco, Liechtenstein, Malta and Andorra have as much voting power as China, India, the United States and Russia combined. For this reason, UN resolutions are often ignored.

In the world as it could be, the voting system of the General Assembly would be reformed. One possible plan would be for final votes to be cast by regional blocks, each block having one vote. The blocks might be. 1) Latin America 2) Africa 3) Europe 4) North America 5) Russia and Central Asia 6) China 7) India and Southeast Asia 8) The Middle East and 9) Japan, Korea and Oceania.

In the world as it is, the United Nations has no reliable means of raising revenues.

In the world as it could be, the United Nations would have the power to tax international business transactions, such as exchange of currencies. Each member state would also pay a yearly contribution, and failure to pay would mean loss of voting rights.

In the world as it is, young men are forced to join national armies, where they are trained to kill their fellow humans. Often, if they refuse for reasons of conscience, they are thrown into prison.

In the world as it could be, national armies would be very much reduced in size. A larger force of volunteers would be maintained by the United Nations to enforce international laws. The United Nations would have a monopoly on heavy armaments, and the manufacture or possession of nuclear weapons would be prohibited.

In the world as it is, young people are indoctrinated with nationalism. History is taught in such a way that one’s own nation is seen as heroic and in the right, while other nations are seen as inferior or as enemies.

In the world as it could be, young people would be taught to feel loyalty to humanity as a whole. History would be taught in such a way as to emphasize the contributions that all nations and all races have made to the common cultural heritage of humanity.

In the world as it is, young people are often faced with the prospect of unemployment. This is true both in the developed countries, where automation and recession produce unemployment, and in the developing countries, where unemployment is produced by overpopulation and by lack of capital.

In the world as it could be, the idealism and energy of youth would be fully utilized by the world community to combat illiteracy and disease, and to develop agriculture and industry in the Third World. These projects would be financed by the UN using revenues derived from taxing international currency transactions.

In the world as it is, women form more than half of the population, but they are not proportionately represented in positions of political and economic power or in the arts and sciences. In many societies, women are confined to the traditional roles of childbearing and housekeeping.

In the world as it could be, women in all cultures would take their place beside men in positions of importance in government and industry, and in the arts and sciences. The reduced emphasis on childbearing would help to slow the population explosion.

In the world as it is, pollutants are dumped into our rivers, oceans and atmosphere. Some progress has been made in controlling pollution, but far from enough.

In the world as it could be, a stabilized and perhaps reduced population would put less pressure on the environment. Strict international laws would prohibit the dumping of pollutants into our common rivers, oceans and atmosphere. The production of greenhouse gasses would also be limited by international laws.

In the world as it is, there are no enforcible laws to prevent threatened species from being hunted to extinction. Many indigenous human cultures are also threatened.

In the world as it could be, an enforcible system of international laws would protect threatened species. Indigenous human cultures would also be protected.

In the world as it is, large areas of tropical rain forest are being destroyed by excessive timber cutting. The cleared land is generally unsuitable for farming.

In the world as it could be, it would be recognized that the conversion of carbon dioxide into oxygen by tropical forests is necessary for the earth’s climatic stability. Tropical forests would also be highly valued because of their enormous diversity of plant and animal life, and large remaining areas of forest would be protected.

In the world as it is, opium poppies and other drug-producing plants are grown with little official hindrance in certain parts of Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America. Hard drugs refined from these plants are imported illegally into the developed countries, where they become a major source of high crime rates and human tragedy.

In the world as it could be, all nations would work together in a coordinated world-wide program to prevent the growing, refinement and distribution of harmful drugs.

In the world as it is, modern communications media, such as television, films and newspapers, have an enormous influence on public opinion. However, this influence is only rarely used to build up international understanding and mutual respect.

In the world as it could be, mass communications media would be more fully used to bridge human differences. Emphasis would be shifted from the sensational portrayal of conflicts to programs that widen our range of sympathy and understanding.

In the world as it is, international understanding is blocked by language barriers.

In the world as it could be, an international language would be selected, and every child would be taught it as a second language.

In the world as it is, power and material goods are valued more highly than they deserve to be. “Civilized” life often degenerates into a struggle of all against all for power and possessions. However, the industrial complex on which the production of goods depends cannot be made to run faster and faster, because we will soon encounter shortages of energy and raw materials.

In the world as it could be, nonmaterial human qualities, such as kindness, politeness, and knowledge, and musical, artistic or literary ability would be valued more highly, and people would derive a larger part of their pleasure from conversation, and from the appreciation of unspoiled nature.

In the world as it is, the institution of slavery existed for so many millennia that it seemed to be a permanent part of human society. Slavery has now been abolished in almost every part of the world. However war, an even greater evil than slavery, still exists as an established human institution.

In the world as it could be, we would take courage from the abolition of slavery, and we would turn with energy and resolution to the great task of abolishing war.

In the world as it is, people feel anxious about the future, but unable to influence it. They feel that as individuals they have no influence on the large-scale course of events.

In the world as it could be, ordinary citizens would realize that collectively they can shape the future. They would join hands and work together for a better world. They would give as much of themselves to peace as peace is worth.

As George Bernard Shaw once said, “Most people look at the world as it is and ask ‘Why?’. We should look at the world as it could be and ask, ‘Why not?’”

A freely downloadable book

A new 418-page book entitled “A World Federation” may be downloaded and circulated gratis from the following link:

http://eacpe.org/app/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/A-World-Federation-by-John-Scales-Avery.pdf

John Scales Avery is a theoretical chemist at the University of Copenhagen. He is noted for his books and research publications in quantum chemistry, thermodynamics, evolution, and history of science. His 2003 book Information Theory and Evolution set forth the view that the phenomenon of life, including its origin, evolution, as well as human cultural evolution, has its background situated in the fields of thermodynamics, statistical mechanics, and information theory. Since 1990 he has been the Chairman of the Danish National Group of Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs. During his tenure The Pugwash Movement won a nobel peace prize.  Between 2004 and 2015 he also served as Chairman of the Danish Peace Academy. He founded the Journal of Bioenergetics and Biomembranes, and was for many years its Managing Editor. He also served as Technical Advisor to the World Health Organization, Regional Office for Europe (1988-1997).

The invasion and occupation of Syria by tens of thousands of jihadists who were recruited from around the world to overthrow Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad, was financed mainly by U.S. taxpayers and by the world’s wealthiest family, the Sauds, who own Saudi Arabia and the world’s largest oil company, Aramco. America’s international oil companies and major think tanks and ‘charitable’ foundations were also supportive and providing propaganda for the operation, but the main financing for it came from America’s taxpayers, and from the Saud family and from the Government that they own.

One of the best articles that the New York Times ever published was by Mark Mazzetti and Matt Apuzzo, on 23 January 2016, “U.S. Relies Heavily on Saudi Money to Support Syrian Rebels”. They reported that, “the C.I.A. and its Saudi counterpart have maintained an unusual arrangement for the rebel-training mission, which the Americans have code-named Timber Sycamore. Under the deal, current and former administration officials said, the Saudis contribute both weapons and large sums of money, and the C.I.A takes the lead in training the rebels. … From the moment the C.I.A. operation was started, Saudi money supported it.” Furthermore, “The White House has embraced the covert financing from Saudi Arabia — and from Qatar, Jordan and Turkey.” But “American officials said Saudi Arabia was by far the largest contributor to the operation.” The invasion and occupation of Syria by jihadists from around the world was primarily a Saud operation, though it was managed mainly by the U.S. Government.

Prior to the failed U.S.-backed coup-attempt on 15 July 2015 to replace Tayyip Erdogan as Turkey’s President, Turkey was part of the U.S-Saudi alliance to overthrow and replace Syria’s Government. But afterwards, Turkey increasingly switched against the U.S. and Sauds, and toward instead supporting the target of the Sauds and of America’s aristocrats: Syria. And, so, Turkey has increasingly joined Syria’s alliance, which includes Iran and Russia. That’s one of the major geopolitical changes in recent decades.

The NYT continued: “The Saudi efforts were led by the flamboyant Prince Bandar bin Sultan, at the time the intelligence chief, who directed Saudi spies to buy thousands of AK-47s and millions of rounds of ammunition in Eastern Europe for the Syrian rebels. The C.I.A. helped arrange some of the arms purchases for the Saudis, including a large deal in Croatia in 2012.”

The U.S. preferred to be supplying the jihadists weapons that weren’t from U.S. manufacturers, in order to impede any tracing back to the United States the arming of the movement to oust and replace Syria’s secular, committedly non-sectarian, Government. The Sauds — who are just as committedly sectarian, and are even supporters of the extreme fundamentalist Wahhabist sect of Sunni Islam — likewise tried to cover their tracks in this operation, but their tracks were financial. The Sauds have been especially skillful at covering their tracks. Prince Bandar bin Sultan al-Saud was a buddy of George W. Bush, and had secretly donated over a million dollars in cash to Al Qaeda prior to the 9/11 attacks, according to Osama bin Laden’s financial bagman, who had picked up personally each one of the million-dollar-cash donations to that organization until 9/11 and who named amongst those donors not only Prince Bandar but also Prince Salman al-Saud, who subsequently became King Salman, who is now the father of Crown Prince Salman, who recently murdered the Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi. Crown Prince Salman is also a close friend of America’s current ‘prince’, Jared Kushner, the U.S. President’s son-in-law. So, the Saud family are very close with America’s Republican aristocrats, perhaps even closer than they are with America’s Democratic aristocrats. But especially because of the business links, the Sauds are deeply influential throughout America’s aristocracy. Not only is Saudi Arabia the world’s most oil-rich country, but it is also the world’s largest purchaser of weapons from Lockheed Martin and the other American ‘defense’ contractors, which sell exclusively to the U.S. Government and to the governments that are allied with it (such as to Saudi Arabia). So, those corporations depend upon the Sauds more than upon any other family, even than any single American family.

The Saud family are also crucial allies with Israel’s aristocracy, who include such American billionaires as the Republican Sheldon Adelson and the Democrat Lesley Wexner.

Prince Bandar was also reported by the FBI to have financed directly from his personal checking account the U.S. stays, and the pilot-training, of at least two of the 15 Saudis who were among the 19 jihadists who carried out the piloting and plane-seizings on 9/11. So, if Bandar didn’t (perhaps in consultation with George W. Bush) actually plan those attacks himself, he at least was one of their chief financial backers.

The NYT article also mentioned that “In late 2012, according to two former senior American officials, David H. Petraeus, then the C.I.A. director, delivered a stern lecture to intelligence officials of several gulf nations at a meeting near the Dead Sea in Jordan. He chastised them for sending arms into Syria without coordinating with one another or with C.I.A. officers in Jordan and Turkey. Months later, Mr. Obama gave his approval for the C.I.A. to begin directly arming and training the rebels from a base in Jordan, amending the Timber Sycamore program to allow lethal assistance. Under the new arrangement, the C.I.A. took the lead in training, while Saudi Arabia’s intelligence agency, the General Intelligence Directorate, provided money and weapons, including TOW anti-tank missiles,” so as to conquer Syria, for the Sauds.

These authors were, however, misguided when they wrote that “While the intelligence alliance is central to the Syria fight and has been important in the war against Al Qaeda, a constant irritant in American-Saudi relations is just how much Saudi citizens continue to support terrorist groups, analysts said.” That “support” to jihadists, to the extent that it was financial, came actually not from “Saudi citizens,” but from the Saudi aristocracy, mainly from the Saud family itself. Moreover, in a monarchy — which Saudi Arabia is — there are no actual “citizens”; there are only the monarch and his or her “subjects” not “citizens” (citizens such as exist in a democracy — even it’s only a so-called one). There are only the monarch and his/her subjects — especially in an absolute monarchy, such as Saudi Arabia. So: that term “citizens” was a false and misleading term in that context.

On 6 March 2013, Britain’s Guardian bannered regarding General Petraeus “From El Salvador to Iraq: Washington’s man behind brutal police squads” and reported his having created the death squads in El Salvador and designed the post-Saddam Iraqi torture program for trying to extract from detainees (though the Guardian failed to note this) whatever information they might have about Saddam Hussein’s role in the 9/11 attacks. Nothing was mentioned in the Guardian, about 9/11, but only that “The aim: to halt a nascent Sunni insurgency in its tracks by extracting information from detainees” — but nothing was said there about what type of “information” was being sought, or why. “With Petraeus’s almost unlimited access to money and weapons, and Steele’s field expertise in counterinsurgency, the stage was set for the commandos to emerge as a terrifying force.” But force for what? The Guardian offered nothing on that.

Thierry Meyssan at Voltairenet, on 9 May 2011, headlined “What you don’t know about the Bilderberg-Group” and he wrote: “The operation was controlled in reality by William J. Donovan, the former commander of the OSS (the U.S. intelligence service during the war), now in charge of building the American branch of the new secret service of NATO, Gladio [2]. … Moreover, the security of each subsequent meeting was not provided by the police of the host country, but by the soldiers of the NATO Alliance.” Meyssan said that “Henry Kissinger is the main person responsible for invitations to the Bilderberg Group.” Another of the “core group” was “Henry R. Kravis: U.S. financier, investment fund manager KKR. He’s a major fundraiser for the Republican Party.” Meyssan called this “The Lobby of the most powerful military organization in the world [NATO].”

Furthermore:

During the last U.S. presidential elections, it was reported that Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton disappeared on June 6, 2008, in order to negotiate an end to their rivalry. In reality, they participated in the annual conference of the Bilderberg Group in Chantilly, Virginia (USA). The following day, Mrs. Clinton announced that she was retiring from the race. … According to our sources, something else happened. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton concluded a financial and political agreement. Senator Obama bailed out his rival financially and offered her a position in his administration (Clinton refused the vice-presidency and instead chose the State Department) in exchange for her active support during the campaign against McCain. Then, the two leaders were presented by James A. Johnson to the Bilderberg Conference, where they assured the participants that they would work together. [Hillary had a solid record and reputation as a neoconservative and as a supporter of overthrowing Syria’s Government.] Barack Obama had already been NATO’s candidate for a long time. [But his campaign rhetoric had nonetheless caused worries amongst the Establishment.] Mr. Obama and his family have always worked for the CIA and the Pentagon. [3] Moreover, the initial funds for his campaign were provided by the Crown of England, via a businessman named Nadhmi Auchi. [See, e.g.: this and this and this and this.] In presenting the Black Senator to the Bilderbergers, the Atlantic Alliance was, in fact, organizing public relations at the international level for the future president of the United States.

Of course, that was even before Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009.

On 11 December 2018, Meyssan headlined “Whom does Emmanuel Macron owe?” and he wrote that, “he owes his electoral campaign mostly to Henry Kravis, the boss of one of the world’s largest financial companies, and to NATO – a considerable debt which weighs heavily today on the solution to the Yellow Vests crisis.” Macron had first met “Henry and Marie-Josée Kravis, in their residence on Park Avenue in New York [1]. (This meeting probably took place in 2007. Thereafter, Emmanuel Macron systematically visited the Kravis couple whenever he was in the USA, and Henry Kravis welcomed him in his offices on Avenue Montaigne when he visited Paris.) The Kravis couple, unfailing supporters of the US Republican Party, are among the great world fortunes who play politics out of sight of the Press.” Furthermore:

In December 2014, Henry Kravis created his own Intelligence agency, the KKR Global Institute. He nominated at its head the ex-Director of the CIA, General David Petraeus.  With the Kravis couple’s private funds (the KKR investment funds), and without referring to Congress, Petraeus pursued operation «Timber Sycamore» which had been initiated by President Barack Obama. This was the largest weapons traffic in History, implicating at least 17 states and representing many thousands of tons of weapons worth several billion dollars [7]. As such, Kravis and Petraeus became the main suppliers for Daesh [8].

On 6 June 2017, Meyssan headlined “Confrontation at Bilderberg 2017” and wrote:

There exist no photographs of the meeting of the Bilderberg Group, whose work is confidential. Security for the meeting is not handled by the FBI, nor the Virginia police force, but by a private militia organised by NATO.

The Bilderberg Group was created in 1954 by the CIA and MI6 in order to support the Atlantic Alliance. …

The 2017 meeting is also described there: Among the Board of Directors, mostly international corporate luminaries, was “Marie-Josée Drouin-Kravis: Economic columnist in print and broadcast media in Canada. Researcher at the very militaristic Hudson Institute. She is the third wife of Henry Kravis.”

Both Petraeus and his two KKR sponsors are regular attendees at the Bilderberg meetings. What financial stake — if any — in assisting the Sauds to take over Syria, KKR has, is not known. But if there is such, then the U.S. Government’s recent decision to quit its military occupation of Syria will presumably be, to that extent, unfavorable for KKR, and unpopular amongst the 150 companies in which it holds stock.

The great investigative journalists Dilyana Geytandzhieva, Andrey Fomin, Manlio Dinucci, Thierry Meysan, and the South Front site, have, in several articles, documented that the Governments of U.S., UAE, Qatar, and mainly Saudi Arabia, are financing and overseeing a multibillion-dollar privately operated weapons-smuggling operation to Sunni jihadist groups such as Al Qaeda in Africa, the Middle East, Pakistan, and Asia. Meyssan writes:

In less than three years, Silk Way Airlines transported at least one billion dollars’ worth of armament.

One thing leading to another, journalist Dilyana Gaytandzhieva uncovered a vast system which also supplied the jihadists not only in Iraq and Syria, but also in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Congo – also paid for by the Saudis and the Emiratis. Some of the arms delivered in Arabia were redirected to South Africa.

The arms transported to Afghanistan were delivered to the Talibans, under the control of the US, which is pretending to fight them. …

Although, according to the international treaties, neither civil nor diplomatic flights are authorised to carry military material, requests for recognition as «diplomatic flights» require the explicit detailing of the cargo transported. However, at the request of the US State Department, at least Afghanistan, Germany, Saudi Arabia, Bulgaria, Congo, the United Arab Emirates, Hungary, Israël, Pakistan, Poland, Romania, Serbia, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Turkey and United Kingdom closed their eyes to this violation of international law, just as they had ignored the CIA flights to and from their secret prisons. …

According to Sibel Edmonds – ex-FBI agent and founder of the National Security Whistleblowers Coalition – Azerbaïdjan, under President Heydar Aliyev, from 1997 to 2001 hosted in Bakou the number 2 of Al-Qaïda, Ayman el-Zawahiri. This was done at the request of the CIA. Although officially wanted by the FBI, the man who was then the number 2 of the international jihadist network travelled regularly in NATO planes to Afghanistan, Albania, Egypt and Turkey. He also received frequent visits from Prince Bandar ben Sultan of Saudi Arabia [11].

International relations are controlled by international corporations, but the identities of the persons who control those are often hidden; so, it’s not easy to say whom has been enriched by the invasion and occupation of Syria. And, probably, there won’t be funding for investigative journalists to do the costly research to find out whom those persons actually are. But they controlled both Obama and Trump, both of whom carried out their policy on Syria.

—————

Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of  They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of  CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity.

Originally posted at strategic-culture.org

In recent years, many researchers and social activists from very different countries, like myself, have rediscovered the notion of the commons as a key idea to deepen social and environmental justice and democratise both politics and the economy. This reappropriation has meant questioning the vanguardist and hierarchical visions, structures and practices that for too long have characterised much of the left. This concept has resurfaced in parallel with the growing distrust in the market and the state as the main suppliers or guarantors of access to essential goods and services. The combined pressures of climate change and the crisis of capitalism that exploded in 2008 (a permanent and global crisis, which is no longer a series of conjunctural or cyclical recessions) force us to reconsider old paradigms, tactics and strategies. This means discarding both the obsolete models of planning and centralised production at the core of the so-called ‘real socialism’ of the last century and the state capitalism that we see today in China and a few other supposedly socialist countries, as well as the equally old and failed structures of present-day deregulated capitalist economies.

At first, the concept of the commons was disseminated by progressive intellectuals inspired by the work of Elinor Ostrom, the first woman to win the Nobel Prize in Economics, in 2009. Ostrom, an American political scientist, was a progressive academic, but could hardly be classified as a radical thinker or as a leftist activist. In the last decade, academics and activists from very diverse ideological families of the left have reviewed her contributions and have engaged in intense theoretical debates about the potential of the commons, based on the analysis of many inspiring prefigurative experiences currently underway.

Ostrom’s main contribution was to demonstrate that many self-organised local communities around the world successfully managed a variety of natural resources without relying on market mechanisms or state institutions. Currently, it is possible to identify various perspectives in the theoretical debates around the commons, but in general they all converge on the importance of a third space between the state and the market (which should not be confused with the Third Way outlined by Anthony Giddens and adopted by politicians as dissimilar as Tony Blair in Britain, Bill Clinton in the United States, or Fernando Henrique Cardoso in Brazil as a hypothetical social democratic alternative to socialism and neoliberalism).

Nowadays, a quick search in Google about the commons results in millions of references. Most definitions tend to characterise commons as spaces for collective management of resources that are co-produced and managed by a community according to their own rules and norms. We (TNI) have recently published a report on the commons in partnership with the P2P Foundation, in which we refer to this concept as the combination of four basic elements: (1) material or immaterial resources managed collectively and democratically; (2) social processes that foster and deepen cooperative relationships; (3) a new logic of production and a new set of productive processes; and (4) a paradigm shift, which conceives the commons as an advance beyond the classical market/state or public/private binary oppositions.

In Latin America and Spain, those of us interested in this field of activism and research must overcome a linguistic obstacle, since the translation of the concept of the commons from English into Spanish is not always easy or appropriate. This problem also appears in other parts of the world, so we often use the original English word to avoid confusion. Some of our friends and comrades use the concept of bienes comunes, but this term refers to ideas linked to the old economy or the social imaginary propagated by the church and other conservative institutions, without capturing all the richness, complexity and potential of recent theoretical developments and empirical processes around the commons. Obviously, the production of meaning in this field has already spread beyond the Anglo-Saxon world and there are already many people in countries of the South involved in this type of processes. That’s why the P2P Foundation and other friendly organisations have added a new word to the Spanish dictionary, procomún, while others (like myself) prefer to use the word comunes, which derives from a literal translation of the original term. From a similar perspective, many European or African activists prefer to use the English term instead of bens comuns (Portuguese), beni comuni(Italian), biens communs (in French), or gemeingüter (German).

Are the concepts of ‘the commons’ and ‘the public’ synonymous?

This question is the axis of heated theoretical debates, since it alludes to the old discussion about the nature and role of the state. The defenders of the commons who are most disillusioned with the left in government in several Latin American countries, particularly those linked to the fundamentalist autonomist current (like many of my friends in the Andean region, mainly those who are involved in struggles around the rights to water or energy) are convinced that the state should not assume any role and that the social order should be restructured by transferring political and economic power to self-organised local communities. Other researchers and activists (including myself, something that’s not surprising having been born in a country as state-centric as Uruguay) retort that such a contradiction is artificial and that we should at the same time expand the reach and influence of the commons – for example, by creating and interconnecting new types of authentically self-managed cooperative enterprises– and democratising or ‘commonising’ the state – for instance, incorporating workers and users into the management of existing state-owned enterprises or creating new public-public partnerships for the provision of essential public services.

My friend Michel Bauwens, a Belgian social activist internationally recognised as one of the most creative and influential thinkers in this field, often highlights the importance of what he has characterised as the partner state. From his (and mine) perspective, the state is perceived not as the enemy, but as an entity that could provide local communities and self-organised workers with the institutional, political or economic power that would be required for these processes to reach their maximum potential in the framework of the political and economic transition that we need. It also means, among several other possibilities to be considered, the provision of financial or in-kind support for cooperatives or other initiatives inspired by the notion of the commons.

The idea of the ​​partner state is in line with some relatively recent theoretical debates among Marxist thinkers. Today, and especially after a series of counter-hegemonic governments that we have had in Latin America, we’re already very aware that the contemporary state is not simply that “committee for the management of the common affairs of the bourgeoisie” that Marx and Engels referred to in the Communist Manifesto. Neither Marx nor Engels were interested in developing a unified or integral theory about the state, so we should not interpret their statement (from the year 1848!) literally,. In the 1970s, Nikos Poulantzas and other non-dogmatic thinkers began to rethink the institutional framework of capitalist societies and argued that the state should be understood as a social relationship and not as an abstract entity floating above conflicting social classes, and added that the transformation of state institutions could be possible in the context of a “democratic way to socialism” (opened by the government experience of Popular Unity in Chile and brutally repressed by a military coup in 1973). More recently, Bob Jessop has shown how, although the state has a strong structural bias towards the reproduction of social relations, it’s also influenced by the totality of social forces, including counter-hegemonic struggles. My perspective of analysis on the state and the commons is very influenced by Jessop, and also by David Harvey, when he argues that a big problem on the left is that many – pointing to John Holloway and other proponents of the thesis of “changing the world without taking power” – think that the capture of state power wouldn’t be of much importance in emancipatory processes. We must recognise the incredible power accumulated in the institutions of the state and, therefore, we shouldn’t underestimate the importance of state institutions; in particular when there’re opportunities to enable the expansion of the commons.

To those who are interested in deepening the knowledge of contemporary theoretical debates on the state and the commons, I would recommend reading our comrade Hilary Wainwright, the British political economist with whom I co-coordinate the TNI New Politics Project. A few years ago Hilary wrote a beautiful book, Reclaim the State: Experiments in Popular Democracy, where she argued the need to ‘occupy’ state institutions while, in parallel, we organise ourselves to create and connect new political and economic institutions rooted in local communities and workers’ collectives. Her books, the one mentioned here and more recent ones, are based on the detailed investigation of positive examples of commons-related initiatives across the Globe.

In recent years, within the framework of our New Politics project, Hilary, myself, and many other activist-scholars from different regions of the world have tried to make sense of a substantial shift in emancipatory thinking. Until not long ago, the economic policy of much of the left included the proposal of nationalisation of key industries. Nowadays, and maybe influenced by the recognition of the failures or shortcomings of nationalisation in places like Venezuela (where in recent years there’s been a recentralisation of political and economic power in the hands of the bureaucrats and military that control the reins of the state, with very negative in terms of lesser autonomy and influence for popular organisations and with very bad indicators in the management of nationalised companies) many of us are more interested in the design of a new economy based on cooperative relations, in which state institutions would play a facilitating and protective role. We emphasise the importance of public ownership of public services and productive infrastructure, but only as long we ensure a significant level of decentralised ownership and management; for example, in the provision of water and energy services and in the production of a vast range of goods through networks of self-managed ventures.

This perspective also means a deeper and more serene examination of the ambivalent consequences of the scientific and technological changes currently underway. We already know that the emerging forms of organisation and control of information and communication technologies and distributed production constitute a very contested space, in which a few transnational corporations (I’m thinking of Uber, Airbnb and other examples of the wrongly called ‘sharing economy’) financialise and benefit from precarious workers, the users of social networks and independent software programmers – with negative impacts on unions’ power and on the quality of work – but we should also be able to recognise that the same technological developments could be beneficial for the (re)creation of truly solidarity, democratic and self-managed forms of ownership and management. Around the world, we can see the emergence of a new generation of workers who use their technological knowledge to launch new enterprises and networks based on the principles of the commons and coordinate and collaborate among themselves, transcending economic sectors and geographical borders, and being ethically (and increasingly also politically) aware of the new social and economic order they’re creating.

How would you appraise the so-called ‘pink tide’ in Latin America vis-à-vis the commons?

My personal perspective on these issues has evolved, as I tried to understand the arguments of comrades from other Latin American countries who posed a very strong critique of the statist political culture prevalent in some political and academic circles of the region. Like many Uruguayans, it was hard for me to assimilate the positions of compañeros like Pablo Solón in Bolivia, Edgardo Lander in Venezuela, Arturo Escobar in Colombia, Maristella Stampa in Argentina, or Eduardo Gudynas himself in Uruguay. They (and many others) are strong critics of ‘development’, and in particular of its ‘(neo)extractivist’ component. In short, my critique to them focused on two aspects: their staunch criticism of the state, and their inability to formulate alternatives or proposals to transcend the reality that they criticised. With the passage of time, and after many and agitated discussions with Pablo and Edgardo in workshops at the World Social Forum, seminars of our New Politics project and other similar spaces, I could understand that their criticisms of the state (not always so homogeneous nor so acidic as I perceived them) were not that far from my own criticism of the Latin American left, and I also ended up realising that indeed there were proposals embedded in their criticisms.

My position on these issues has also been influenced by my increasingly pessimistic interpretation of the outcomes of our progressive of left governments. After having followed very closely the processes of Venezuela, Ecuador, Argentina, Uruguay and Brazil, and to a lesser extent also those of Bolivia and Nicaragua, I think we should ask ourselves up to what point is it possible for the left to get involved in government without losing autonomy and our utopian perspective. In other word: is it possible to operate within the state apparatus without being caught in the demobilising logic of institutional power? Unlike some of the friends I mentioned before, I don’t have a single or categorical answer to such question. I still believe that the state has a very important role to play, but I’m also convinced that it is now imperative for the left to get rid of its obsolete state-centric vision and open up to fresh perspectives like those of the commons.

For the Uruguayan left, such transition could be difficult, if we consider the heavy weight of the state in our society, politics, economics and culture. A significant difference between Uruguay and most other countries in the region is its long tradition of strong and efficient state-owned companies, which are highly appreciated by the population. In Uruguay, people perceive the state as a catalyst for development and guarantor of equity and social integration. On the other hand, the transition could be made easier if we consider the already high significance of workers’ and housing cooperatives. I grew up in a mutual-aid housing cooperative, so I might not be entirely objective. And we know that not all cooperatives are well managed or are internally democratic or participatory, but when we compare the reality of the Uruguayan cooperative sector with other countries of the region and the world, it’s clear that we already have a very fertile terrain for the development of the commons.

From a purely theoretical or ideological point of view, many components of the current global debate around the commons wouldn’t be a novelty for the Uruguayan left. If we look at several parties that compose the ruling coalition Frente Amplio(Broad Front), we realise that parties as different as the Progressive Christian Democrats (PDC, the advocates of the thesis of socialismo autogestionario, self-managed socialism), the People’s Victory Party (PVP, in line with their libertarian roots), or the Socialist Party (PS, with their proposal of transition from co-management to self-management, which the party has been advocating since 1930, when it demanded workers’ control of the economy) have been for a long time formulating programmatic ideas that transcend the limits of statism.

In other countries of the region, it would seem that the proposal of the commons would be more compatible with the governmental discourse. In fact, the proponents of the commons in Europe often refer to the concepts of vivir bien (living well) or buen vivir (good living), which came from Latin America. These concepts became popular on a world scale as a supposed alternative paradigm to capitalism. The concepts of suma qamaña and sumaq kawsay have their roots in the economic and societal models developed over centuries by the indigenous peoples of the Andean and Amazonian regions, prioritising forms of production more horizontal and in harmony with nature. The translation (or ‘export’) into other languages and cultures is problematic, but in the countries of origin the significance of these concepts can be debated as well. Bolivia and Ecuador, during the governments led by Evo Morales and Rafael Correa, incorporated the notions of living well and good living in their respective constitutions and policy guidelines, but the policies implemented have not always been coherent with the spirit or with the letter of the new legal and institutional framework. In Ecuador, in the framework of the very radical turn to the right performed by president Lenin Moreno in recent months, the discourse of buen vivir (which sounds beautiful and guarantees a left patina) is being used to provide justification for an impending wave of privatisation and corporatization of public services. In Venezuela, there was also much talk around self-management and people’s power, and considerable resources were allocated to the creation of cooperatives and associative ventures of a new type, but in practice very little progress was achieved; the rentier model based on the exploitation of a single resource – oil – deepened during the governments of Hugo Chávez and Nicolás Maduro, and its current exhaustion is the most important factor to explain the political, economic and social crisis that the country suffers today.

What are the organisational and programmatic challenges of the left for the integration of the idea of the commons into its political platform?

To answer this question, I should start by clarifying that I do not believe that the promotion of the commons should be the only strategy of the left. I believe that we must embrace the emancipatory vision of the commons, but without forgetting the role of the state and the need to respond to the very urgent problems of large sectors of the population. I agree with the criticisms of the hegemonic model of development and support the struggles against extractivism. I also tend to agree with many elements (not the whole package) of the emerging theorisation around the concept of degrowth – which is already very influential among European left circles, but not very significant within the Latin American left. But I disagree with visions such as Escobar’s when he speaks of “underdevelopment” as a mere “narration”, presenting it as an abstract concept that the colonialists would have elaborated and spread for the colonized to repeat. We can’t ignore the terrible rates of poverty, exclusion, and poor access to basic goods and services that still affect millions of Latin Americans. Our region should be incorporated into the global fight against climate change, and we must promote new forms of organisation and production that preserve the ecological balance, but we must also respond to social demands in the context of a quite likely deterioration of the economic situation in the short or medium terms. In that sense, I believe that the impulse to the commons must be framed within a broader strategy of growth, different from that offered by predatory and savage capitalism.

Thinking about the specific conditions of Uruguay, and based on data and projections published by local researchers, it should already be evident that the promotion of mega-projects like the huge paper mills run by Finnish corporations, or the already privatisation of the wind segment of the energy sector, don’t constitute the most appropriate developmental strategy. I would have preferred that the effort made by the government to convince us that the attraction of direct foreign investment and the liberalisation of trade are the right path would have been accompanied by serious studies sustained by reliable information to appraise the pros and cons of two different strategies: supporting large private investment on the one hand, and the promotion of the local and popular solidarity economy on the other. What would be the impacts of redirecting the tax exemptions and the large explicit or covert subsidies received by large transnational corporations if all that money were used to support cooperatives and other associative enterprises rooted in the national economy? I don’t have concrete answers to these queries, but I know that other Uruguayan economists and social researchers also raise similar questions and could provide objective and relevant information to deepen this exchange.

How to incorporate the commons within a political project that aims at the de-commodification of public services?

In Latin America we have many valuable examples of de-commodification of public services, past and present, that we should reconsider in the framework of current exchanges around the commons. A few years ago, during the heyday of what we then praised as the Bolivarian ‘revolution’, I worked in Venezuela and I was able to appreciate very closely the emergence of multiple processes of popular self-organisation in which millions of people participated. I’m referring to the mesas técnicas (people’s technical committees), the consejos comunitarios de agua(community water councils), the consejos comunales (communal councils) and the comunas (communes). Unfortunately, most of these processes are no longer in existence or in terminal crisis. Individualism and competition has been stronger than solidarity and cooperation in the responses to the crisis that Venezuela is experiencing today. This is a sad realisation, which forces us to question ourselves about the reasons and the conditions that made possible the erosion of processes that many of us considered very strong and even irreversible. A large part of the communal and participatory initiatives that had emerged in the most fecund years of the Venezuelan transition have gone into rapid regression when faced with the loss of the resources provided by the state (of which they had become dependent), in the context of the terrible deterioration of the social and economic situation. I think that many lessons can emerge from Venezuela, both on the potential of the commons and on the fragility of processes of this type. It also forces us to rethink the limits of ‘revolutionary’ political projects that are excessively focused on the state.

At the international level, and taking as a basis for analysis the European reality – which is the one that today I know better, since it’s my place of residence, activism and research – I believe that Latin Americans could ‘import’ some interesting ideas from current European exchanges on alternatives to commodification and corporatization. The side of the European left most active side in the promotion of the commons is that linked to struggles around the right to the city and the citizen platforms that won local office in several Spanish cities. Today, an important part of the European left perceives the city as the privileged space for political, social and economic experimentation, without seeing cities as isolated entities or at the margin of processes aimed at changing the state on a national scale, but recognising their growing significance in the new regional and world order. It’s not by chance that the fight against climate change or for the recovery of public services are led by networks of progressive local governments. Barcelona En Comú, the citizen coalition that now governs the Catalan capital, in particular, is a very powerful source of inspiration of regional and world importance. The political influence of Barcelona today is comparable to the hope that Porto Alegre, Montevideo and other Latin American capitals had been generated in the 1980s and 1990s, when the left began to experiment with participatory budgeting and other innovative policies for the radicalisation of democracy at the municipal level. Barcelona is today a laboratory for the design and testing of multiple initiatives inspired by the principle of the commons.

Another possible source of inspiration could be the current program of the British Labour Party. Since Jeremy Corbyn became party leader, Labour has become much more radical than our Frente Amplio and most other left parties in Latin America and Europe. The Labour Party has a proposal for renationalisation that’s much more advanced than similar initiatives applied or proposed anywhere else in the world. In the specific case of the energy sector, Corbyn and his party propose to bring back the sector into public hands, so that the country’ energy becomes environmentally sustainable, affordable for users, and managed with democratic control, as stated in the programmatic manifesto launched last year. But renationalisation, from this perspective, does not simply implies that the state retakes control by going back to the obsolete state-owned companies of the past, but rather the combination of different forms of public ownership and management. In short, Labour proposes not merely to re-nationalise companies that had been privatised during Thatcherism and Blairism, but to reconvert the big banks and other financial institutions that during the crisis had been saved from bankruptcy with public monies into a network of local banks based on mixed ownership (state and social), or the creation of new municipal utilities. The party is committed to create new municipal utilities, inspired by some socially-owned companies already in operation – such as Robin Hood Energy in Nottingham – or by popular campaigns – such as Switched On London – that propose the de-privatisation of power through the launch of new public enterprises, rooted in a more democratic type of management based on the active participation of users and workers, being environmentally sustainable, and securing services with affordable rates for the entire population.

Daniel Chavez, a TNI fellow, specialises in left politics, state companies and public services. He is an active contributor of the Municipal Services Project (MSP) research network, has contributed to Alternatives to Privatization: Public Options for Essential Services in the Global South (Routledge, 2012) and has co-edited The Reinvention of the State: Public Enterprises and Development in Latin America and the world.

Originally posted at the Transnational Institute Website

Make an audit of the profit and loss account

From the time of evolution of human life

And the loss of lives of humans and other species

Due to the evolution of human race

Your life and mine deserve nothing better

Than a place in the dustbins that humans failed to create.

Behold the power of being superior to nature’s instinct

To feel powerful in your own life wasted

And to supersede with your ignorance on nature’s laws

To protect the laws and myths you create

Your laws cannot even satisfy you.

Then how can they satisfy the rest?

No modern medicine exists

For the assertion of your arrogance

Of development that you yourself detest

Search your pockets and search for the price of life

Search on your insecurity and search for your wisdom

There is only one key for your survival and mine

Let nature flourish with you and me

With you and I as its particles.

Let the universe remember

Our contribution to humility

To live in this planet by abiding nature’s laws

For the past present and future.

Let the morons try to defeat the laws of nature

Let the wise ones defeat the myths of the ignorant.

You and I may not pass the test of heaven or hell

The only test to pass is our social audit

Of the profit and loss of one’s own existence.

K.P. Sasi is a film maker, cartoonist and a writer

In many ways it is painful to reflect on the year 2018; a year of vital opportunities lost when so much is at stake.

Whether politically, militarily, socially, economically, financially or ecologically, humanity took some giant strides backwards while passing up endless opportunities to make a positive difference in our world.

Let me, very briefly, identify some of the more crucial backward steps, starting with the recognition by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists in January that the year had already started badly when they moved the Doomsday Clock to two minutes to midnight, the closest it has ever been to ‘doomsday’ (and equal to 1953 when the Soviet Union first exploded a thermonuclear weapon matching the US capacity). See ‘It is now two minutes to midnight’.

This change reflected the perilous state of our world, particularly given the renewed threat of nuclear war and the ongoing climate catastrophe. It didn’t even mention the massive and unrelenting assault on the biosphere (apart from the climate) nor, of course, the ongoing monumental atrocities against fellow human beings.

Some Lowlights of 2018

1. The global elite, using key elite fora such as the Group of 30, the Trilateral Commission, the Bilderberg Group and the World Economic Forum, continued to plan, generate and exacerbate the many ongoing wars, deepening exploitation within the global economy, climate and environmental destruction, and the refugee crisis, among many other violent impacts, in pursuit of greater elite power, profit and privilege.

2. International organizations (such as the United Nations, the World Bank and International Monetary Fund) and national governments used military forces, legal systems, police forces and prison systems around the world to serve the global elite by defending its interests against the bulk of the human population, including those individuals and organizations audacious enough to challenge elite power, profit and privilege.

3. $US1.7 trillion was officially spent worldwide on military weapons to kill fellow human beings and other lifeforms, and to destroy the biosphere. See ‘Global military spending remains high at $1.7 trillion’.

However, so out-of-control is this spending that the United States has now spent $US21trillion on its military in the past 20 years for which it cannot even account! That’s right, $US1trillion each year, including 2018, above the official US national budget for killing is ‘lost’. See Army General Fund Adjustments Not Adequately Documented or Supported, ‘Has Our Government Spent $21 Trillion Of Our Money Without Telling Us?’ and ‘The Pentagon Can’t Account for $21 Trillion (That’s Not a Typo)’.

4. War and other military violence continued to rage across the planet wreaking devastation on many countries and regions, particularly in the Middle East and Africa. If you missed this, read what is happening to Yemen, described as ‘ the world’s worst [humanitarian] crisis in decades’ with ‘three quarters of the entire Yemeni population – 22 million women, children and men – dependent on some form of humanitarian assistance to survive.’ See ‘Yemen: UN chief hails “signs of hope” in world’s worst man-made humanitarian disaster’.

5. Not content with the nature and extent of the military violence they are inflicting already, during 2018 elites continued to plan how to do it more effectively in future with research and development of artificial intelligence just one manifestation of this: ‘an “arms race in AI” is now underway, with the U.S., China, Russia, and other nations (including Britain, Israel, and South Korea) seeking to gain a critical advantage in the weaponization of artificial intelligence and robotics’ so that ‘artificial intelligence will be applied to every aspect of warfare, from logistics and surveillance to target identification and battle management’. See ‘“Alexa, Launch Our Nukes!” Artificial Intelligence and the Future of War’.

6. The United States government unilaterally withdrew from the Intermediate Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty (which limits the deployment of intermediate range nuclear weapons).

7. Another significant proportion of global private financial wealth – conservatively estimated by the Tax Justice Network in 2010 to already total between $US21 and $US32 trillion – has been invested virtually tax-free through the world’s still-expanding black hole of more than 80 ‘offshore’ tax havens (such as the City of London Corporation, Jersey, Guernsey, the Isle of Man, Bermuda, the Cayman Islands, Hong Kong, Nauru, St. Kitts, Antigua, Tortola, Switzerland, the Channel Islands, Monaco, Cyprus, Gibraltar and Liechtenstein). This is just financial wealth. ‘A big share of the real estate, yachts, racehorses, gold bricks – and many other things that count as non-financial wealth – are also owned via offshore structures where it is impossible to identify the owners.’ See Tax Justice Network.

Controlled by the global elite, Wall Street and other major banks manage this monstrous diversion of wealth under Government protection. ‘Their business is fraud and grand theft.’ Tax haven locations offer more than tax avoidance. ‘Almost anything goes on.’ It includes ‘bribery, illegal gambling, money laundering, human and sex trafficking, arms dealing, toxic waste dumping, conflict diamonds and endangered species trafficking, bootlegged software, and endless other lawless practices.’ See ‘Trillions Stashed in Offshore Tax Havens’.

8. The world’s major corporations continued to inflict enormous ongoing violence (in a myriad of ways) in their pursuit of endless profit at the expense of living beings (human and otherwise) and Earth’s biosphere by producing and marketing a wide range of life-destroying products ranging from nuclear weapons and nuclear power to junk food, pharmaceutical drugs, synthetic poisons and genetically mutilated organisms (GMOs). These corporations include those involved in the following industries: weapons manufacturers, major banks and their ‘industry groups’ like the International Monetary Conference, asset management firms, investment companies, financial services companies, fossil fuel (coal, oil and gas) corporations, technology corporations, media corporations, major marketing and public relations corporations, agrochemical (pesticides, seeds, fertilizers) giants, pharmaceutical corporations, biotechnology (genetic mutilation) corporations, mining corporations, nuclear power corporations, food multinationals and water corporations. You can see a list of the major corporations in this article: ‘The Global Elite is Insane Revisited’.

9. More than a billion people continued to live under occupation, dictatorship or threat of genocidal assault. See, for example, ‘500 Years is Long Enough! Human Depravity in the Congo’.

10. 36,500,000 human beings (mainly in Africa, Asia and Central/South America) were starved to death.

11. 18,250,000 children were killed by adults in wars, by starving them to death, and in a large variety of other ways.

12. 8,000,000 children were trafficked into sexual slavery; executed in sacrificial killings after being kidnapped; bred to be sold as a ‘cash crop’ for sexual violation, to produce child pornography (‘kiddie porn’) and ‘snuff’ movies (in which children are killed during the filming); ritually tortured and murdered as well as raped by dogs trained for the purpose. See ‘Humanity’s “Dirty Little Secret”: Starving, Enslaving, Raping, Torturing and Killing our Children’.

13. Hundreds of thousands of individuals were kidnapped or tricked into slavery, which now denies 46,000,000 human beings the right to live the life of their choice, condemning many individuals – especially women and children – to lives of sexual slavery, forced labor or as child soldiers. See ‘The Global Slavery Index’ and ‘46 million people living as slaves, latest global index reveals’.

14. Well over 100,000 people (particularly Falun Gong practitioners) in China, where an extensive state-controlled program is conducted, were subjected to forced organ removal for the trade in human organs. See Bloody Harvest and The Slaughter.

15. 15,750,000 people were displaced by war, persecution or famine. There are now 68,500,000 people, more that half of whom are children and 10,000,000 of whom are stateless, who have been forcibly displaced worldwide and remain precariously unsettled, usually in adverse circumstances. One person in the world is forcibly displaced every two seconds. See ‘Figures at a Glance’.

16. Millions of people were made homeless in their own country as a result of war, persecution, ‘natural’ disasters, internal conflict, poverty or as a result of elite-driven national economic policy. The last time a global survey was attempted – by the United Nations back in 2005 – an estimated 100 million people were homeless worldwide. As many as 1.6 billion people lack adequate housing (living in slums, for example). See ‘Global Homelessness Statistics’.

17. 73,000 species of life (plants, birds, animals, fish, amphibians, insects and reptiles) on Earth were driven to extinction with the worldwide loss of insects, including vital pollinators such as bees, now between 75% and 90%, depending on the species. See ‘Insect Decimation Upstages Global Warming’. Have you seen a butterfly recently?

18. Separately from global species extinctions, Earth continued to experience ‘a huge episode of population declines and extirpations, which will have negative cascading consequences on ecosystem functioning and services vital to sustaining civilization. We describe this as a “biological annihilation” to highlight the current magnitude of Earth’s ongoing sixth major extinction event.’ Moreover, local population extinctions ‘are orders of magnitude more frequent than species extinctions. Population extinctions, however, are a prelude to species extinctions, so Earth’s sixth mass extinction episode has proceeded further than most assume.’ See ‘Biological annihilation via the ongoing sixth mass extinction signaled by vertebrate population losses and declines’ and ‘Biological Annihilation on Earth Accelerating’.

19. Wildlife trafficking, worth up to $20 billion in 2018, is pushing many endangered species to the brink of extinction. Illegal wildlife products include jewelry, traditional medicine, clothing, furniture, and souvenirs, as well as some exotic pets, most of which are sold to unaware/unconcerned consumers in the West. See, for example, Stop Wildlife Trafficking.

20. 16,000,000 acres of pristine rainforest were destroyed (with more than 40,000 tropical tree species now threatened with extinction). See ‘Measuring the Daily Destruction of the World’s Rainforests’, ‘Estimating the global conservation status of more than 15,000 Amazonian tree species’ and ‘Half of Amazon Tree Species Face Extinction’.

21. Vast quantities of soil were washed away as we destroyed the rainforests, and enormous quantities of both inorganic constituents (such as heavy metals like cadmium, chromium, lead, mercury, nickel and zinc) and organic pollutants (particularly synthetic chemicals in the form of fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides) were dumped into the soil as well, thus reducing its nutrients and killing the microbes within it. We also contaminated enormous quantities of soil with radioactive waste. See Soil-net, ‘Glyphosate effects on soil rhizosphere-associated bacterial communities’ and ‘Disposing of Nuclear Waste is a Challenge for Humanity’.

22. The TEPCO nuclear power plant in Fukushima, Japan discharged 109,000 tons of radioactive waste into the Pacific Ocean killing an incalculable number of fish and other marine organisms and indefinitely contaminating expanding areas of that ocean. See ‘Fukushima: A Nuclear War without a War: The Unspoken Crisis of Worldwide Nuclear Radiation’.

23. Human use of fossil fuels to power aircraft, shipping and vehicles (among other purposes) released 10 billion metric tons (gigatons) of carbon dioxide into Earth’s atmosphere, a 2.7% increase over 2017. See ‘Global Carbon Budget 2018’ and ‘Carbon dioxide emissions will hit a record high globally in 2018’. As a measure of their concern elite-controlled governments and corporations around the world are currently planning or have under construction 1,380 new coal plants? That’s right. 1,380 new coal plants. In 59 countries. See ‘NGOs Release List of World’s Top Coal Plant Developers’ and ‘2018 Coal Plant Developers List’.

24. 90 billion land animals and 60 billion marine animals were killed for human consumption, more than 100 million animals were killed for laboratory purposes in the United States alone and there were other animal deaths in shelters, zoos and in blood sports. See ‘How Many Animals Are Killed Each Year?’

In addition, 40 million animals were killed for their fur. Approximately 30 million of these animals were raised on fur farms and killed, about 10 million wild animals were trapped and killed, and hundreds of thousands of seals were killed for their fur. See ‘How Many Animals are Killed Each Year?’

25. Farming of animals for human consumption released 7,100,000,000 tonnes of CO2-equivalent into Earth’s atmosphere. About 44% of livestock emissions were in the form of methane (which was 44% of anthropogenic CH4 emissions), 29% as Nitrous Oxide (which was 53% of anthropogenic N2O emissions) and 27% as Carbon Dioxide (which was 5% of anthropogenic CO2 emissions). See ‘GHG Emissions by Livestock’.

26. Human use of fossil fuels and farming of animals released 3.2 million metric tons of (CO2 equivalent) nitrous oxide (N2O) into Earth’s atmosphere. See ‘Nitrous oxide emissions’.

27. As a result of previous greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and the consequent rise of about one degree celsius in the global temperature, causing the melting of Arctic permafrost and undersea methane ice clathrates, an incalculable quantity of methane was uncontrollably released into the atmosphere during 2018 (with the quantity being released getting ever closer to ‘exploding’). See ‘7,000 underground gas bubbles poised to “explode” in Arctic’ and ‘Release of Arctic Methane “May Be Apocalyptic,” Study Warns’.

28. Ice in the Antarctic is melting at a record-breaking rate, losing 219 billion tonnes of ice in 2018 at a rate that has accelerated threefold in the last five years. See ‘Antarctic ice melting faster than ever, studies show’.

29. An incalculable amount of agricultural poisons, fossil fuels and other wastes was discharged into the ocean, adversely impacting life at all ocean depths – see ‘Staggering level of toxic chemicals found in creatures at the bottom of the sea, scientists say’ – and generating ocean ‘dead zones’: regions that have too little oxygen to support marine organisms. See ‘Our Planet Is Exploding With Marine “Dead Zones”’.

30. At least 8 million metric tons of plastic, of which 236,000 tons were microplastics, was discharged into the ocean. See ‘Plastic waste inputs from land into the ocean’ and ‘Plastics in the Ocean’.

31. Earth’s fresh water and ground water was further depleted and contaminated. These contaminants included bacteria, viruses and household chemicals from faulty septic systems; hazardous wastes from abandoned and uncontrolled hazardous waste sites (of which there are over 20,000 in the USA alone); leaks from landfill items such as car battery acid, paint and household cleaners; the pesticides, herbicides and other poisons used on farms and home gardens; radioactive waste from nuclear tests; and the chemical contamination caused by hydraulic fracturing (fracking) in search of shale gas, for which about 750 chemicals and components, some extremely toxic and carcinogenic like lead and benzene, have been used. See ‘Groundwater contamination’, ‘Groundwater drunk by BILLIONS of people may be contaminated by radioactive material spread across the world by nuclear testing in the 1950s’ and ‘Fracking chemicals’.

32. The longstanding covert military use of geoengineering – spraying tens of millions of tons of highly toxic metals (including aluminium, barium and strontium) and toxic coal fly ash nanoparticulates (containing arsenic, chromium, thallium, chlorine, bromine, fluorine, iodine, mercury and radioactive elements) into the atmosphere from jet aircraft to weaponize the atmosphere and weather – in order to enhance elite control of human populations, continued unchecked. Geoengneering is systematically destroying Earth’s ozone layer – which blocks the deadly portion of solar radiation, UV-C and most UV-B, from reaching Earth’s surface – as well as adversely altering Earth’s weather patterns and polluting its air, water and soil at incredible cost to the health and well-being of living organisms and the biosphere. See ‘Geoengineering Watch’.

33. As one outcome of our dysfunctional parenting model and political systems, fascism continued to rise around the world. See ‘The Psychology of Fascism’.

34. Despite the belief that we have ‘the right to privacy’, privacy (in any sense of the word) was ongoingly eroded in 2018 and is now effectively non-existent, particularly thanks to Alphabet (owner of Google). Taken together, ‘Uber, Amazon, Facebook, eBay, Tinder, Apple, Lyft, Foursquare, Airbnb, Spotify, Instagram, Twitter, Angry Birds… have turned our computers and phones into bugs that are plugged in to a vast corporate-owned surveillance network. Where we go, what we do, what we talk about, who we talk to, and who we see – everything is recorded and, at some point, leveraged for value.’ Moreover, given Google’s integrated relationship with the US government, the US military, the CIA, and major US weapons manufacturers, there isn’t really anything you can do that isn’t known by those who want to know it. In essence, Google is ‘a powerful global corporation with its own political agenda and a mission to maximise profits for shareholders’ and it partly achieves this by expanding the surveillance programs of the national security state at the direction of the global elite. See ‘Google’s Earth: How the Tech Giant Is Helping the State Spy on Us’ and the documentary ‘The Modern Surveillance State’.

35. The right to free speech was ongoingly eroded in 2018. For just a couple of examples in the United States alone, see ‘Marc Lamont Hill On Getting Fired From CNN, His Remarks On Palestine + More’ and ‘A Texas Elementary School Speech Pathologist Refused to Sign a Pro-Israel Oath, Now Mandatory in Many States – so She Lost Her Job’.

36. Believing that we know better than evolution, humans created the first gene-edited baby in 2018. See ‘Why we are not ready for genetically designed babies’ and ‘China’s Golem Babies: There is Another Agenda’.

37. An incalculable amount of junk was added to the 100 trillion items of junk already in Space. See ‘Space Junk: Tracking & Removing Orbital Debris’.

38. Incalculable amounts of antibiotic waste, nuclear waste, nanowaste and genetically engineered organisms were released into Earth’s biosphere. See ‘Junk Planet: Is Earth the Largest Garbage Dump in the Universe?’

39. Ongoing violence against children – see ‘Why Violence?’ and ‘Fearless Psychology and Fearful Psychology: Principles and Practice’– ensured that more people will grow up accepting (and quite powerless to challenge) our dysfunctional and violent world, as described above.

40. The corporate media, education and entertainment industries continued to distract us from reality ensuring that most people remain oblivious to our predicament and their own role in it, let alone what they can do to respond powerfully.

While the above list of the setbacks humanity and the Earth suffered in 2018 is very incomplete, it still provides clear evidence that humanity is rapidly entering a dystopian future far more horrific than the worst novel or film in the genre. The good news is that, at the current rate, this dystopian world will be shortlived as humans drive themselves over the edge of extinction. See ‘Human Extinction by 2026? A Last Ditch Strategy to Fight for Human Survival’.

But so that the picture is clear and ‘balanced’: were there any gains made against this onslaught?

Of course, it goes without saying that the global elite, international organizations (such as the United Nations), governments, corporations and other elite agents continued to live in delusion/denial endlessly blocking any initiative requiring serious action that would cut into corporate profits, or arguing over tangential issues of insignificant consequence to humanity’s future.

In short, I could find no record of official efforts during the year to plan for the development and implementation of a comprehensive, just and sustainable peace, but perhaps I missed it.

Separately from this, there have been some minor activist gains: for example, some western banks and insurance companies are no longer financially supporting the expansion of the western weapons industry and the western coal industry, some rainforest groups have managed to save portions of Earth’s rainforest heritage, and activist groups continue to work on a variety of issues sometimes making modest gains.

In essence however, as you probably realize, many of the issues above are not even being tackled and, even when they are, activist efforts have been hampered by inadequate analysis of the forces driving conflicts and problems, limited vision (particularly unambitious aims such as those in relation to ending war and the climate catastrophe), unsophisticated strategy (necessary to have profound impact against a deeply entrenched, highly organized and well-resourced opponent, with the endless lobbying of elite institutions, such as governments and corporations, despite this effort simply absorbing and dissipating our dissent, as is intended – as Mark Twain once noted: ‘If voting made a difference, they wouldn’t let us do it.’) and failure to make the difficult decisions to promote necessary solutions that are ‘unpopular’.

Fundamentally, these ‘difficult decisions’ include the vital need to campaign for the human population, particularly in the West, to substantially reduce their consumption – by 80% – involving both energy and resources of every kind as the central feature of any strategy to curtail destruction of the environment and climate, to undermine capitalism and to eliminate the primary driver of war: violent resource acquisition from Middle Eastern and developing nations for the production of consumer goods and services for western consumers.

While we live in the delusion that we can simply substitute renewable energy for fossil fuels and nuclear power (or believe such delusions that a 1.5 degrees celsius increase above the preindustrial temperature is acceptable or that we have an ‘end of century’ timeframe to solve the climate crisis), we ignore the fundamental reality that Earth’s biosphere is under siege on many fronts as a result of our endless extraction of its natural resources – such as fresh water, minerals, timber and, again, fossil fuels – for consumer production and the provision of services that go well beyond energy.

In short, for example, we will not save the world’s rainforests because we switch to renewable energy. We must reduce demand for the consumer products that require rainforest inputs. We must stop mining the Earth for minerals that end up in our mobile phones, computers, vehicles, ships and aircraft by not using the products and services these minerals make possible. We must stop eating meat and other animal products. And so the list goes on.

Forecasting 2019

In many ways it is painful to forecast what will happen in 2019 mainly because of the absurd simplicity of doing so: It will be another year when vital opportunities will be lost when so much is at stake.

Given the insanity of the global elite – see ‘The Global Elite is Insane Revisited’ – which will continue to drive the dynamics producing the lowlights mentioned above with the active complicity of their agents in governments and corporations coupled with a human population that is largely terrified, self-hating and powerless to resist – see ‘In Defense of the Human Individual’ – it is a straightforward task to forecast what will happen in 2019.

So let me forecast 40 lowlights for 2019:

1. See list above.
2. See list above.
3. See list above.

.

.

40. See list above.

So unless you play your part, 2019 and the few years thereafter will simply be increasingly worse versions of 2018 and it will all be over by 2026. See ‘Human Extinction by 2026? A Last Ditch Strategy to Fight for Human Survival’ which cites a wide range of scientific and other evidence which you are welcome to consider for yourself if this date seems premature.

Responding Powerfully

If you already feel able to act powerfully in response to this multifaceted crisis, in a way that will have strategic impact, you are invited to consider joining those participating in ‘The Flame Tree Project to Save Life on Earth’, which outlines a simple plan for you to systematically reduce your consumption, by at least 80%, involving both energy and resources of every kind – water, household energy, transport fuels, metals, meat, paper and plastic – while dramatically expanding your individual and community self-reliance in 16 areas, so that all environmental and climate concerns are effectively addressed.

If you are also interested in conducting or participating in a campaign to systematically address one of the issues identified above, you are welcome to consider acting strategically in the way that Mohandas K. Gandhi did. Whether you are engaged in a peace, climate, environment or social justice campaign, the 12-point strategic framework and principles are the same. See Nonviolent Campaign Strategy. And, for example, you can see a basic list of the strategic goals necessary to end war and halt the climate catastrophe. See ‘Strategic Aims’.

If you want to know how to nonviolently defend against a foreign invading power or a political/military coup, to liberate your country from a dictatorship or a foreign occupation, or to defeat a genocidal assault, you will learn how to do so in ‘Nonviolent Defense/Liberation Strategy’.

If you are interested in nurturing children to live by their conscience and to gain the courage necessary to resist elite violence fearlessly, while living sustainably despite the entreaties of capitalism to over-consume, then you are welcome to make ‘My Promise to Children’.

To reiterate: capitalism, war and destruction of the environment and climate are outcomes of our dysfunctional parenting of children which distorts their intellectual and emotional capacities, destroys their conscience and courage, and actively teaches them to over-consume as compensation for having vital emotional needs denied. See ‘Love Denied: The Psychology of Materialism, Violence and War’.

If your own intellectual and/or emotional functionality is the issue and you have the self-awareness to perceive that, and wish to access the conscience and courage that would enable you to act powerfully, try ‘Putting Feelings First’.

And if you want to be part of the worldwide movement committed to ending all of the violence identified above, consider signing the online pledge of ‘The People’s Charter to Create a Nonviolent World’.

In summary: if we do not rapidly, systematically and substantially reduce our consumption in several key areas and radically alter our parenting model, while resisting elite violence strategically on several fronts, homo sapiens will enter Earth’s fossil record within a few years. Given the fear, self-hatred and powerlessness that paralyses most humans, your choices in these regards are even more vital than you realize.

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?’ His email address is flametree@riseup.net and his website is here.

To survive the holocaust of planetary proportions that is upon us, one must defend her or get out of the way.

I live across a small stream from an ancient rainforest in Wayanad, Kerala. It has a constancy that’s baffling, appearing more or less the same to me, for all the years I’ve been here. The forest sustains. As do you and I. Tangled beings brought together by strange and bewildering feats of alchemy. No matter what we name this tangle, it is before and beyond all words, all naming. Walk in the forest and abandon your notion of a separate self and embrace instead the communal mind, this pullulating dance between beings.

The forest renews itself. It does this every moment. As do our bodies, yours and mine. It holds together. As do you and I, an astonishing thing. That I stand here today is nothing short of a miracle, a similar tangle of mysteries, the life work of multitudinous beings called cells, cooperating over decades, a human lifetime.

The forest begets stories. Like a single wood spider laying a clutch of thousands of eggs, the forest is gravid with stories. Humans and non-humans have lived here for scores of years, leading to intermingling clutches of cultural history, epic in every sense. Paniya people have lived here since time immemorial, they don’t know how long. If we believe anthropologists, they are the original humans of this subcontinent. The Paniyas have their own origin stories, how they came here. They say their stories are given to them by their ancestors, and these stories help them sustain their culture, which includes the non-humans. For me, the stories are given by the land itself, and the creatures I share this place with.

There are as many stories as there are beings in this forest. Worms, ants, spiders, trees, epiphyllous liverworts, laterite nodules interpenetrated with alga, maggots, eggs, seeds, filaments of fungi; waters bearing beings, beings bearing water; lung cells, and skin cells talking to the air, and air talking to the leaves; multiplicitous symbionts forming composite entities, the whole forest is alive. There is nothing that is not part of life, where do the elements end and organisms begin?

The longer I live here, the harder I search for a non-living space, I cannot find one! Even if you and I disagree about the consciousness of rocks (wilful beings operating on different time scales, with a rock-mind vastly different from ours), we will agree that without rocks certain lichens wouldn’t thrive. The rock offers its minerals to the lichens, the lichens are grazed by the snails, the snails are picked by the cormorant, who is hunted by the eagle.

Around me are crowds of beings but there is no waste. Everybody is food for somebody else. The innumerable myriad beings transform their world, the forest. They create it and eat it, make love in it and die in it. Their bodies are worlds for other beings. Individual presences are palpable, even though there are so many. They are all apparently independent, and carrying on with their individual lives. They are also interdependent. This creates a whole. And a constancy.

The forest goes on through aeons. It breaks down, and it goes on. It dies,and it lives. It, too, was born, but a very long time ago, and it too will die. Because its end is brutally hastened by modern men and their supermachines, we will never know what the natural life span of this forest is. Indigenous people just say it was always like this. On closer look, birth, growth and death are happening simultaneously. This fecundity is a hundred million years old, according to science. The rainforest endures. It’s the work of these creatures, primarily these plants and their prolific enjoyment of each other, and their event-making and storytelling that sustains this fullness, this rainforest biome. They certainly sustain large mammal, biped, story-teller me.

Is there a fundamental principle of the natural world that we can perceive directly through our senses, that does not require an education in biology or environmental studies or ecology? Do we see connections? Do we experience interdependancy? Do we recognise diversity? Do we dwell in interbeing? Do we feel our embeddedness in the weave of life? Do we know our very own capacity for renewal? Do we hear the surround symphony we are immersed in?

Call out to the plants if you want to learn the secret of renewal. You must follow the green ones, and find out how they live; for they are the clever alchemists who keep the world going. You must visit an ancient rainforest, like the one where I live — Old Mother Forest I call her — and sit under the trees. If you want to know what’s eternal, and beyond forever, ask them.

Perhaps other questions arise. How old is ancient? Is everyone here ancient? Who sustains whom? What is life and death in a place that is aeonic in its imagination, yet wholly present, so utterly in-the-now? What is time to such an entity? Are there many senses of time, one for each one who lives here, for every type of being? Who begets whom? Is the forest the mother of the trees (and all their companion beings, plant, animal, fungal, elemental and other), or is it the other way around, that each of these impassioned beings begets the forest, through every action, and in every place they inhabit?

Even under extreme assault, plants are able to regenerate and revitalise a place. Their desire to live is fierce, tenacious and inspirational. They are masters of strategies; full spectrum, I’d say. If you want to survive the holocaust of planetary proportions that is upon us all, you must defend the plants, and help them, or you must get out of the way, so they can get on with their planet-healing work. You must ally with them against the machines. You must observe their rules. Geniuses that they are, and wizards at transforming matter and energy, they cannot combat hubris if you are messing around with them; telling them what to do, and choosing one over the other, playing games with their bodies, as if they are stupid mindless things.

If you want to create cultures of sustainability, then again, listen to the green ones, and visit an ancient forest. Here, the mighty trees with their swirls of tender plants, and interweaving fungal allies, and flashes of colourful animals can show you how community, fecundity and diversity lead to immortality. Relearn the old ways here, how to relate with other beings, how to sustain each other and the whole culture indefinitely. Who created the biosphere? And who knows best how to keep it going?

Old Mother Forest.

Suprabha Seshan is a conservationist. She lives and works at the Gurukula Botanical Sanctuary, a forest garden in the Western Ghat mountains of Kerala. She is currently working on her book, Rainforest Etiquette in a World Gone Mad, forthcoming from Context, Westland Publishers.

“Earth is now substantially out of energy balance. The amount of solar energythat Earth absorbs exceeds the energy radiated back to space. The principalmanifestations of this energy imbalance are continued global warming on decadaltime scales and continued increase in ocean heat content” (James Hansen 2018).

“The people have no voice since theyhave no information” …“No First World country has ever managed to eliminate so entirely from its media all objectivity – much less dissent” (Gore Vidal)

With the exception of the few who comprehend the nature of a Faustian Bargain[1],some billionaires,captains of industry and their political and media mouthpieces are driving humanity toward self-destruction through the two biggest enterprises on Earth, the fossil fuel industry,which is devastating the Earth atmosphere,and the industrial-military machine leading toward nuclear war. The rest of the world is dragged subconsciously, induced by bread and circuses.

http://www.bitsofscience.org/insane-spike-global-average-temperature-february-2016-6926/

By close analogy with the tobacco denial syndrome[2], albeit with consequences affecting the entire Earth, the fossil fuel industry has been paying climate pseudo scientists to propagate fabricated untruths regarding the origins and consequences of global warming,widely disseminated by the media.

Despite irrefutable evidence for global warming, such fabrications are still quoted by pro-coal lobbies and compliant politicians, including:

1. Denial of basic laws of physics, i.e. the black body radiation laws of Plank, Stefan-Boltzmann and Kirchhoff[3]
2. Denial of direct observations and measurements in nature, in particular the sharp rises of temperatures,ice melt rates, sea level rise and extreme weather events.
3. Denial of the global warming origin of extreme weather events, i.e. the closely monitored rise in storms, hurricanes, fires and droughts in several parts of the world.[4]
4. Denial of the bulk of the peer-reviewed literature summed up in the IPCC reports.
5. Denial of conclusions of the world’s premier climate research organizations (NASA, NOAA, NSIDC (National Snow and Ice Data Centre), Hadley-Met, Tindale, Potsdam, WMO (World Meteorological Organization), CSIRO, BOM and other organizations).

In view of the rapidly growing direct evidence from the increase in extreme weather events, the common tactic has changed from outright denial to a minimization of the significance and consequences of the shift in state of the climate.

Whereas news items channeled by international news agencies regarding extreme weather events are generally reported, at least by national broadcasters, the plethora of discussion and debate programs on TV and radio stations mostly overlook the enhanced toxic effects of carbon gases[5], or relegate it behind sports and entertainment news. In most instances discussion panels focus on the inside political machinations rather than the critical issues themselves.

According to Mary Debrett[6]: “We are now in the middle of perfect storm of miscommunication about climate change. Various factors have converged to confound rational public conversation. Public opinion polling indicates that although there is widespread acceptance of climate change resulting from human activities, the public’s preparedness to pay for action to mitigate climate change is actually declining – even as climate scientists warn of the increasing urgency for action.  These results signal a serious problem in the public communication of climate change.  They reflect this perfect storm – where tensions between the media, politicians and various lobby groups have made it impossible for scientists and others with appropriate expertise, to cut through”

The major influence the media exerts on public opinion[7], and the extent to which it can be referred to as the “tail which wags the political dog”, allows it nearly as much,or more, political power as political leaders, chief bureaucrats and heads of corporation. A power accompanied with little responsibility.

Andrew Glikson Earth and paleo-climate scienctist

The summer of 2018 was intense: deadly wildfires, persistent drought, killer floods and record-breaking heat. Although scientists exercise great care before linking individual weather events to climate change, the rise in global temperatures caused by human activities has been found to increase the severity, likelihood and duration of such conditions.

Globally, 2018 is on pace to be the fourth-hottest year on record. Only 2015, 2016 and 2017 were hotter. The Paris climate agreement aims to hold temperature rise below 1.5 to 2 degrees Celsius, but if humankind carries on its business-as-usual approach to climate change, there’s a 93 percent chance we’re barreling toward a world that is 4 degrees Celsius warmer by the end of the century, a potentially catastrophic level of warming.

A Warning and a Reckoning

In 1992, 1,700 scientists around the world issued a chilling “warning to humanity.” The infamous letter declared that humans were on a “collision course” with the natural world if they did not rein in their environmentally damaging activities.

Such apocalyptic thinking might be easy to mock, and not entirely helpful in inspiring political action if end times are nigh. In 2017, however, more than 15,000 scientists from 184 countries co-signed their names to an updated—and even bleaker—version of the 1992 manifesto.

The latest version, titled “World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity: A Second Notice,” asserts that most of the environmental challenges raised in the original letter—i.e., depletion of freshwater sources, overfishing, plummeting biodiversity, unsustainable human population growth—remain unsolved and are “getting far worse.”

“Especially troubling is the current trajectory of potentially catastrophic climate change due to rising [greenhouse gases] from burning fossil fuels, deforestation, and agricultural production—particularly from farming ruminants for meat consumption,” the paper states.

“Moreover,” the authors wrote, “We have unleashed a mass extinction event, the sixth in roughly 540 million years, wherein many current life forms could be annihilated or at least committed to extinction by the end of this century.”

But they stressed that, “Soon it will be too late to shift course away from our failing trajectory, and time is running out.”

More recently, President Trump’s own administration released on November 23 the 1,600-page Fourth National Climate Assessment, a quadrennial report compiled by 13 federal agencies. This report paints a particularly grim picture, including more frequent droughts, floods, wildfires and extreme weather, declining crop yields, the rise of disease-carrying insects and rising seas—all of which could reduce U.S. gross domestic product by a tenth by the end of the century.

So what we saw this summer? Unless humanity gets its act together, we can expect much worse to come. Here’s a peek into our climate-addled future.

1. Species Extinction

The Amazon, one of the most biodiverse places on Earth, could lose about 70 percent of its plant and amphibian species and more than 60 percent of its birds, mammals and reptile species from unchecked climate change, according to a 2018 study by the University of East Anglia, the James Cook University and World Wildlife Fund (WWF), which analyzed the impact of climate change on nearly 80,000 species of plants, birds, mammals, reptiles and amphibians inhabiting the WWF’s 35 “Priority Places” for conservation.

The study’s most alarming projection was for the Miombo Woodlands in central and Southern Africa, one of the priority places most vulnerable to climate change. If global temperatures rose 4.5 degrees Celsius, the researchers projected the loss of 90 percent of amphibians and 80 percent or more of plants, birds, mammals and reptiles.

This incredible loss of biodiversity affects humans, too. “This is not simply about the disappearance of certain species from particular places, but about profound changes to ecosystems that provide vital services to hundreds of millions of people,” the authors warned.

2. Food Insecurity and Nutritional Deficiencies

While climate change could actually benefit colder parts of the world with longer growing seasons, tropical and subtropical regions in Africa, South America, India and Europe could lose vast chunks of arable land. For coastal countries, rising seas could inundate farming land and drinking water with salt.

Staple crops such as wheat, rice, maize and soybeans, which provide two-thirds of the world’s caloric intake, are sensitive to temperature and precipitation and to rising atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide. A sweeping 2017 study showed that every degree-Celsius of warming will reduce average global yields of wheat by 6 percent, rice by 3.2 percent, maize by 7.4 percent and soybeans by 3.1 percent.

What’s more, according to a recent paper, carbon dioxide levels expected by 2050 will make staple crops such as rice and wheat less nutritious. This could result in 175 million people becoming zinc deficient (which can cause a wide array of health impacts, including impaired growth and immune function and impotence) and 122 million people becoming protein deficient (which can cause edema, fat accumulation in liver cells, loss of muscle mass and in children, stunted growth). Additionally, the researchers found that more than 1 billion women and children could lose a large portion of their dietary iron intake, putting them at increased risk of anemia and other diseases.

3. Farewell to Coastal Cities and Island Nations

Unless we cut heat-trapping greenhouse gases, scientists predict sea levels could rise up to three feet by 2100, according to the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fifth Assessment report.

This could bring high tides and surges from strong storms, and be devastating for the millions of people living in coastal areas. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) published a reportearlier this year that predicted parts of Miami, New York City and San Francisco could flood every day by 2100, under a sea-level rise scenario of three feet.

Entire countries could also be swallowed by the sea due to global warming. Kiribati, a nation consisting of 33 atolls and reef islands in the South Pacific, is expected to be one of the first.

Kiribati won’t be alone. At least eight islands have already disappeared into the Pacific Ocean due to rising sea levels since 2016, and an April study said that most coral atolls will be uninhabitable by the mid-21st century.

4. Social Conflict and Mass Migration

In 2017, New York Magazine Deputy Editor David Wallace-Wells wrote an alarming and widely read essay called “The Uninhabitable Earth” that focused almost entirely on worst-case climate scenarios. He discussed that, with diminished resources and increased migration caused by flooding, “social conflict could more than double this century.”

The article’s scientific merit has been fiercely debated, but the World Bank did conclude in March 2018 that water scarcity, crop failure and rising sea levels could displace 143 million people by 2050. The report focused on Sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia and Latin America, which represent 55 percent of the developing world’s population. Unsurprisingly, the poorest and most climate-vulnerable areas will be hardest hit.

5. Lethal Heat

Today, around 30 percent of the global population suffers deadly levels of heat and humidity for at least 20 days a year, a 2017 analysis showed. If emissions continue increasing at current rates, the researchers suggested 74 percent of the global population—three in four people—will experience more than 20 days of lethal heat waves.

“Our attitude towards the environment has been so reckless that we are running out of good choices for the future,” Camilo Mora of the University of Hawaii at Manoa, the study’s lead author, told National Geographic.

“For heatwaves, our options are now between bad or terrible,” he added. “Many people around the world are already paying the ultimate price of heatwaves.”

6. Surging Wildfires

The Camp Fire, which burned more than 150,000 acres in Butte County in November, was the deadliest and most destructive fire in California’s history, killing at least 85 people. The Mendocino Complex Fire, which started in July and torched roughly 300,000 acres in Northern California, was the largest fire in the state’s modern history. The second-largest was 2017’s Thomas Fire, which burned 281,000 acres in Santa Barbara and Ventura counties.

But the Golden State’s fires will only get worse, according to California’s Fourth Climate Change Assessment released by the governor’s office in August. If greenhouse gases continue rising, large fires that burn more than 25,000 acres will increase by 50 percent by the end of the century, and the volume of acres that will be burned by wildfires in an average year will increase by 77 percent, the report said.

“Higher spring and summer temperatures and earlier spring snowmelt typically cause soils to be drier for longer, increasing the likelihood of drought and a longer wildfire season, particularly in the western United States,” The Union of Concerned Scientists explained in a blog post.

“These hot, dry conditions also increase the likelihood that wildfires will be more intense and long-burning once they are started by lightning strikes or human error.”

7. Hurricanes: More Frequent, More Intense

It’s not currently clear if changes in climate directly led to 2017’s major hurricanes, including Harvey, Irma, Maria and Ophelia. What we do know is this: Moist air over warm ocean water is hurricane fuel.

“Everything in the atmosphere now is impacted by the fact that it’s warmer than it’s ever been,” CNN Senior Meteorologist Brandon Miller said. “There’s more water vapor in the atmosphere. The ocean is warmer. And all of that really only pushes the impact in one direction, and that is worse: higher surge in storms, higher rainfall in storms.”

NOAA concluded this June that, “It is likely that greenhouse warming will cause hurricanes in the coming century to be more intense globally and have higher rainfall rates than present-day hurricanes.”

8. Melted Polar Ice and Permafrost

The Arctic is warming at a rate twice as fast as the rest of the planet, and continued loss of ice and snow cover “will cause big changes to ocean currents, to circulation of the atmosphere, to fisheries and especially to the air temperature, which will warm up because there isn’t any ice cooling the surface anymore,” Peter Wadhams, head of the Polar Ocean Physics Group at the University of Cambridge, told Public Radio International. “That will have an effect, for instance, on air currents over Greenland, which will increase the melt rate of the Greenland ice sheet.”

Not only that, frozen Arctic soil—or permafrost—is starting to melt, causing the release of methane, a far more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. It’s said that the permafrost holds 1.8 trillion tons of carbon, more than twice as much as is currently suspended in the Earth’s atmosphere. Wadhams explained that the fear is that the permafrost will melt in “one rapid go.” If that happens, “The amount of methane that comes out will be a huge pulse, and that would have a detectable climate change, maybe 0.6 of a degree. … So, it would be just a big jerk to the global climate.”

9. The Spread of Pathogens

Disturbingly, permafrost is full of pathogens, and its melting could unleash once-frozen bacteria and viruses, The Atlantic reported. In 2016, dozens of people were hospitalized and a 12-year-old boy died after an outbreak of anthrax in Siberia. More than 2,000 reindeer were also infected. Anthrax hadn’t been seen in the region for 75 years. The cause? Scientists suggested that a heat wave thawed a reindeer carcass that was infected with the disease decades ago, according to NPR.

While we shouldn’t get too frightened about Earth’s once-frozen pathogens wiping us out (yet), the warming planet has also widened the geographic ranges of ticks, mosquitoes and other organisms that carry disease.

“We now have dengue in southern parts of Texas,” George C. Stewart, McKee Professor of Microbial Pathogenesis and chair of the department of veterinary pathobiology at the University of Missouri, told Scientific American. “Malaria is seen at higher elevations and latitudes as temperatures climb. And the cholera agent, Vibrio cholerae, replicates better at higher temperatures.”

10. Dead Corals

As the world’s largest carbon sink, our oceans bear the brunt of climate change. But the more carbon it absorbs (about 22 million tons a day), the more acidic the waters become. This could put a whole host of marine life at risk, including coral reef ecosystems, the thousands of species that depend on them and the estimated 1 billion people around the globe who rely on healthy reefs for sustenance and income. According to Science, “Researchers predict that with increasing levels of acidification, most coral reefs will be gradually dissolving away by the end of the century.”

These climate predictions are worst-case scenarios, but there are many more dangers to consider in our warming world. A report recently published in the journal Nature Climate Change found “evidence for 467 pathways by which human health, water, food, economy, infrastructure and security have been recently impacted by climate hazards such as warming, heatwaves, precipitation, drought, floods, fires, storms, sea-level rise and changes in natural land cover and ocean chemistry.”

Half a Degree Matters

Since the 19th century, the Earth has warmed by 1 degree Celsius. Now, a major IPCC special report released in October warns that even just a half-degree more of warming could be disastrous. “Every extra bit of warming matters, especially since warming of 1.5ºC or higher increases the risk associated with long-lasting or irreversible changes, such as the loss of some ecosystems,” said Hans-Otto Pörtner, co-chair of IPCC Working Group II.

The panel said that “limiting global warming to 1.5°C compared to 2°C could go hand in hand with ensuring a more sustainable and equitable society.”

With President Trump saying he doesn’t believe his own administration’s climate report, that sustainable and equitable society remains a distant dream.

This article was produced by Earth | Food | Life, a project of the Independent Media Institute, and originally published by Truthout.

Lorraine Chow is a freelance writer for EcoWatch

Eminent climate scientist Professor James Hansen has published a must-read, 55-page summary of the worsening climate emergency. In short, to correct the Earth’s presently disastrous energy imbalance we must urgently reduce the atmospheric CO2 to 342-373 ppm CO2 from the present disastrous 407 ppm CO2. The cost of extracting 1 ppm of CO2 from the atmosphere is $878-1803 billion but continuing inaction is not an option – the Paris commitments mean a 3C temperature rise  and eventual inundation of coastal areas by a 15-25 meters sea level rise. Hope is not lost  –  resolutely promised prosecutions of politician, corporate and media climate criminals may finally force urgent climate action.

Professor James Hansen was formerly head of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies and is presently an adjunct professor directing the Program on Climate Science, Awareness and Solutions of the Earth Institute at 96-Nobel Laureate Columbia University [1]. However his latest summary of the science underlying the worsening climate emergency [3] will fall on deaf ears because climate criminal corporate Big Money malignantly dominates, perverts and subverts Mainstream media [4-10]  and trumps the voices of Humanity’s leading climate scientists such as James Hansen. Indeed while scientists are overwhelmingly concerned about the worsening climate emergency as evidenced by a 2017  letter signed by over 15,000 scientists [11, 12], and the 2018  IPCC Report on plus 1.5C [13, 14], industrial carbon pollution and atmospheric  CO2 continue to rise inexorably  [3, 11-20].

Profit-driven, corporate-backed climate change denial has been well documented [7, 8]  but Naomi Klein has summarized the fundamental neoliberal capitalist objection to climate change action: “Many deniers are quite open about the fact that their distrust of the science grew out of the powerful fear that if climate change is real, the political implications would be catastrophic … I think these hard-core ideologues understand the real significance of climate change better than most of the “warmists” in the political center , the ones who are still insisting that the response can be gradual and painless and that we don’t need to go to war with anybody, including the fossil fuel companies… the real reason we are failing to rise to the climate moment is because the actions required directly challenge our reigning economic paradigm (deregulated capitalism combined with public austerity)… [and] spell extinction for the richest and most powerful industry the world has ever known – the oil and gas industry)” ([5], pages 42, 43 and 63).

While there is “outright climate change denial” by right-wing, anti-science buffoons  like US president Donald Trump,  there is a dominant global political culture of “effective climate  change denial”  through climate change inaction that is best illustrated by the woefully insufficient national commitments at the 2015 Paris Climate Change Conference that even if adhered to will amount to a catastrophic 2-9-3.4^oC temperature rise by 2100 [21, 22].

Grossly insufficient climate action through “outright climate change denial” and “effective climate change denial” is well illustrated by climate criminal Australia that is among the world leaders in 14 global warming-related areas of climate criminality, specifically (1) annual per capita greenhouse gas (GHG) pollution, (2) live methanogenic livestock exports,  (3) natural gas exports, (4) actual or adumbrated exploitation of recoverable shale gas reserves that can be accessed by hydraulic fracturing (fracking), (5) coal exports, (6) land clearing,  deforestation and ecocide, (7) speciescide – species extinction, (8) coral reef destruction, (9) whale killing  and extinction threat through global warming, (10) terminal carbon pollution budget exceedance,   (11) per capita carbon debt, (12) GHG generating iron ore exports, (13) climate change inaction and (14) climate genocide and approaches towards omnicide and terracide [23]. While about half of the ruling Coalition Australian Government MPs idiotically espouse “outright climate change denial”,  the whole government is involved in “effective climate change denial” through climate change inaction in these 14 areas. While it pays lip service to the reality of global warming and the need for massive investment in renewable energy, the Labor Opposition is just as “effective climate change denialist” as the Coalition by having a common policy with the Coalition Government of unlimited exports of coal, gas and methanogenically-derived meat. A picture says a thousand words, and PM Scott “Scomo” Morrison, leader of the pro-coal Coalition (COALition) Government  held up  a lump of coal in the Australian Parliament, declaring “This is coal. Don’t be afraid, don’t be scared” [24].

However Humanity does have serious cause to be afraid and to be scared over coal and greenhouse gas (GHG) pollution. Thus air pollution from carbon fuel burning ultimately kills about 7 million people globally each year, with pollutants from the burning of Australia’s world-leading coal exports contributing to about 75,000 of these annual deaths [25]. Global warming from greenhouse gas (GHG) pollution has been estimated to kill about 0.4 million people annually [26], but this is surely an under-estimate because 15 million people die avoidably each year from deprivation in tropical and sub-tropical Developing countries (minus China) [27], countries that are disproportionately impacted by global warming through  more severe droughts, forest fires, floods, intense storms, and storm surges. Several leading climate scientists, namely Dr James Lovelock FRS and Professor Kevin Anderson, have suggested that only 0.5 billion may survive this century if global warming is not requisitely tackled, this translating to a worsening climate genocide in which 10 billion people will die from climate change this century at an average rate of 100 million per year [26] i.e. 6 times greater than the current 15 million avoidable deaths from deprivation each year  [27].

The present and predicted carnage poses the questions of personal responsibility, complicity, and climate criminality. Indeed one must consider individual and collective complicity in manslaughter, murder, genocide and depraved indifference to such deadly events. Briefly, manslaughter is unintentional killing, murder is intentional killing, and genocide is defined by Article 2 of the UN Genocide Convention which states  “In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, as such: a) Killing members of the group; b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group” [28].

Individual or collective complicity is more difficult to define. Thus, for example,  I spend a lot of my time researching and writing about the deadly consequences of man-made climate change  but I am a citizen of a country, Australia, that is among world leaders in climate criminality and, as a measure of carbon footprint,  has a per capita  GDP  ($56,000) that is 35 times greater than that of acutely global warming-threatened  Bangladesh ($1,600) and 28 times greater than that of acutely global warming-threatened  India ($2,000) [29]. Setting aside these embarrassing realities, we can nevertheless readily identify the worst individual climate criminals – the directors of fossil fuel companies, “climate change denialist” or  “effective climate change denialist” politicians guilty of deadly climate criminality through climate change inaction, and journalists, editors and commentators guilty of depraved indifference through espousing “outright climate change denial” or “effective climate change denial”.

There is a compelling case for   resolutely promised, global prosecutions of politician, corporate and media climate criminals – a resolute promise by decent Humanity that may finally force urgent climate action. However before  considering this promised retribution in detail it is useful to consider the resolute rejection or ignoring by climate criminals of 3 key realities  set out by  leading climate scientist Professor James Hansen  in his recent, must-read analysis of the worsening climate emergency, “the gathering storm” [3].

1. James Hansen on the Earth’s energy imbalance and the need for negative CO2 emissions to 342-373 ppm CO2: “Earth is now substantially out of energy balance. The amount of solar energy that Earth absorbs exceeds the energy radiated back to space. The principal manifestations of this energy imbalance are continued global warming on decadal time scales and continued increase in ocean heat content. Quantitative understanding of Earth’s energy imbalance has improved over the past decade. The upper two kilometers of the ocean, where most of the excess energy is stored, has been well-monitored by the international Argo floats program since 2005. Over the full solar cycle 2005-2016 Earth’s energy imbalance is 0.75 ± 0.25 W/m2 . The range 0.5 to 1 W/m2 is substantial. For example, in order to restore Earth’s energy balance by reducing atmospheric CO2, which is the principal cause of the imbalance, CO2 would need to be reduced from its 2018 407 amount to 373 ppm if the imbalance is 0.50 W/m², but to 342 ppm if the imbalance is 1 W/m² . In reality CO2 is not only continuing to increase, its rate of growth is increasing. The reason is that global population and energy demands continue to increase, and about 85 percent of global energy is provided by fossil fuels” [3].

The climate criminal reality is that atmospheric CO2 is increasing [3, 18], the rate of growth of atmospheric CO2 is increasing [3, 18], electricity sector use of coal, gas and oil is remorselessly increasing [17], and annual industrial CO2 pollution is increasing [19, 20], as is atmospheric pollution by the potent greenhouse gases  methane (CH4) [30, 31] and nitrous oxide (N2O) [31, 32].  The remorseless increase in carbon pollution and GHG pollution rejects even the notion of zero carbon pollution, and likewise the vital concepts of “negative carbon pollution” and “negative economic growth” are utterly ignored [15]. Using coral reefs as a “canary in the coal mine” one can estimate that coral reefs starting dying when the CO2 reached 320 ppm at a time (1965) when the world’s population was 3.3 billion as compared to the present 7.5 billion i.e. on this basis the Earth is overpopulated by a factor of about 2 [15].  However the presently dominant neoliberal economists argue that  present “negative population growth” in some advanced countries is bad for the “economic growth” to which they are ideologically committed.

2. James Hansen on paleoclimatological evidence for the predicted 3°C of warming meaning a long-term 15-25 meters sea level rise:  “Sea level reached heights as great as 6-9 meters during the prior interglacial period, the Eemian about 120,000 years ago, when global temperature was only about 1°C above the pre-industrial level, i.e., similar to today’s global temperature. During the early Pliocene, several million years ago, when global temperature was at most about 3°C warmer than pre-industrial conditions, sea level probably reached as high as 15-25 meters above today’s level. In other words, there is plenty of vulnerable ice available to cause eventual sea level rise that would inundate today’s coastal cities, in response to a warming level that we could produce this century. Burning all of the readily available fossil fuels would eventually melt almost all the ice on the planet, raising sea level 65-75 meters (more than 300 feet)” [3].

The climate criminal reality is that long-term sea level rise is essentially ignored by the North and the problem, if at all recognized, is left to future generations to deal with in a process of extraordinary  intergenerational injustice [3,  33 ]. The Island Nations and mega-delta countries of the South such as Bangladesh are acutely aware of the problem that is already impacting them severely, and indeed talk of a worsening climate genocide [26, 34].

3. James Hansen on the $1-2 trillion cost of lowering atmospheric CO2 by merely 1 ppm: “How much CO2 must be extracted from the air today to offset the excess growth of greenhouse gas forcing in a single year, i.e., to reduce climate forcing by 0.015 W/m2? Atmospheric CO2 must be reduced almost exactly 1 ppm CO2 to increase heat radiation to space by 0.015 W/m2. [We actually need to suck more than 1 ppm from the air, because the ocean reacts to the reduction of atmospheric CO2 by increasing the net backflux of CO2 to the atmosphere. However, we can make our point without including this added difficulty in achieving CO2 drawdown.] One ppm of CO2 is 2.12 billion tons of carbon or about 7.77 billion tons of CO2. Recently Keith et al.(2018) achieved a cost breakthrough in carbon capture, demonstrated with a pilot plant in Canada. Cost of carbon capture, not including the cost of transportation and storage of the CO2, is $113-232 per ton of CO2. Thus the cost of extracting 1 ppm of CO2 from the atmosphere is $878-1803 billion” [3].

The climate criminal reality is that in the last decade the atmospheric CO2 (as measured at Mauna Loa in Hawaii)  has been increasing at about 2.5 ppm CO2  per year [18] and the cost of reducing atmospheric CO2 by this amount would accordingly be about $2-4.5 trillion each year, a bill to be eventually and inescapably paid by future generations in a process of gross  intergenerational injustice [3, 33]. In his Papal Encyclical “Laudato Si’” Pope Francis cogently argued that the environmental and social costs of pollution must be “fully borne” by those incurring them (i.e. a full Carbon Price) ([35], Section 195 [36]. However the climate criminals insist that the environmental and social costs of pollution must be “fully borne” by the Biosphere, Humanity as a whole, and in particular by the young and future generations i.e. monstrous,   “might is right” climate theft, climate larceny, climate murder,  and intergenerational injustice. It is notable that climate economist Dr Chris Hope from 90-Nobel laureate Cambridge University has estimated a damage-related carbon price of about $100-$200 per tonne of CO2 [37, 38].

There still is hope – resolutely promised prosecutions of climate criminals may force urgent climate action

My science-informed and scientist friends and colleagues are very despondent about climate change inaction. As a scientist I am generally optimistic about things but in relation to climate change I have had to concede for several years now  that avoiding a catastrophic plus 2^oC temperature rise is now essentially unavoidable, while nevertheless  asserting that we must do everything we can to help make the future “less bad” for our children and future generations. However 2 things augur well for  “making the future less bad”, specifically Climate Revolution [39] and Climate Justice involving resolutely promised prosecutions of climate criminals [40, 41].

At some point Climate Revolution will happen when the South and the Young revolt (non-violently one hopes) against the rich, neoliberal One Percenters of the North who own half the world’s wealth and are hell-bent on pushing Humanity and the Biosphere over the edge of the existential cliff. The key issue that is assiduously hidden by the mendacious, One Percenter-controlled Mainstream media is Humanity’s gigantic,  ever-increasing and inescapable Carbon Debt [38]. The Historical Carbon Debt (aka Historical Climate Debt) of a country can be measured by the amount of greenhouse gas (GHG) it has introduced into the atmosphere since the start of the Industrial Revolution in the mid-18th century. Thus the total Carbon Debt of the world from 1751-2016 (including CO2 that has gone into the oceans) is about 1,850 billion tonnes CO2. Assuming a damage-related Carbon Price of $200 per tonne CO2-equivalent,   this corresponds  to a Carbon Debt of $370 trillion, similar to the total wealth of the world and 4.5 times the world’s total annual GDP. Using estimates of national contributions to Historical  Carbon Debt and assuming a damage-related Carbon Price in USD of  $200 per tonne CO2,  the World has a Carbon Debt of $370 trillion that is increasing at $13 trillion per year.  

My own country, Australia, has a Carbon Debt of US$7.5 trillion (A$10.7 trillion) that is increasing at US$400 billion (A$570 billion) per year and at US$40,000 (A$57,000) per head per year for under-30 year old Australians. When young Australians realize the enormity of this imposition they will be enraged and take resolute action – but that day of reckoning has been  delayed by the mendacity of largely US-owned Australian Mainstream media. Nevertheless young Australians are well aware that they have been horribly betrayed without realizing the enormity of the betrayal. Already the climate criminal, pro-coal COALition is facing a landslide electoral loss in the mid-year 2019 Federal elections. In 2018 thousands of school children across the country skipped school to demonstrate for climate action (after PM Scott Morrison asserted that they should go back to school, the children correctly replied that it is PM Morrison who should go back to school). When under-30 year old young Australians realize their inescapable Carbon Debt   is increasing at about A$60,000 per year per person they will utterly reject the climate criminal parties at the ballot box.

There is a real prospect of Climate Justice  involving resolutely promised prosecutions of climate criminals  and confiscation of their assets (as presently happens to traders in illicit drugs). There is no legislative retrospectivity  required in this – climate murder, climate homicide and climate genocide are presently just as  deadly as “conventional” murder, homicide and genocide. Something of the order of 1 million people die climate-related deaths annually, with this set to soar to an average of 100 million such deaths per year this  century if man-made climate change is not  requisitely addressed [26].  Of course such punishments will be scant comfort to the loved ones of those who have died. However most importantly it is the resolute threat of prosecutions of climate criminals that may finally force urgent climate action. There needs to be a new globally-endorsed social contract to the effect that significant, present-day  climate criminals will be inescapably held to account with judicially-imposed penalties ranging up to life imprisonment with confiscation of all assets.    Please tell everyone you can – there still is realistic hope that we can stop the present slide to disaster.