Global Trade and Resources Ministry (GTandRM) proposal over time since 1985.

By Paul Craig Roberts

June 11, 2018 "Information Clearing House" - Nowhere in the Western world is truth respected. Even universities are imposing censorship and speech control. Governments are shutting down, and will eventually criminalize, all explanations that differ from official ones. The Western world no longer has a print and TV media. In its place there is a propaganda ministry for the ruling elite.

Whistleblowers are prosecuted and imprisoned despite their protection by federal statue. The US Department of Justice is a Department of Injustice. It has been a long time since any justice flowed from the DOJ.

The total corruption of the print and TV media led to the rise of Intermet media such as Wikileaks, led by Julian Assange, a prisoner since 2012.

Assange is an Australian and Ecuadorian citizen. He is not an American citizen. Yet US politicians and media claim that he is guilty of treason because he published official documents leaked to Wikileaks that prove the duplicity and criminality of the US government.

It is strickly impossible for a non-citizen to be guilty of treason. It is strickly impossible under the US Constitution for the reporting of facts to be spying. The function of the media is to expose and to hold accountable the government. This function is no longer performed by the Western print and TV media.

Washington wants revenge and is determined to get it. If Assange were as corrupt at the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, National Public Radio, MSNBC, etc., he would have reported the leaker to Washington, not published the information, and retired as a multi-millionaire with Washington’s thanks. However, unfortunately for Assange, he had integrity.

Integrity today in the Western world has no value. You cannot find integrity in the government, in the global corporations, in the universities and schools, and most certainly not in the media.

After leaving Assange, an Australian citizen, to Washington’s mercy since 2012, belated pro-Assange protests in Australia forced the US vassal state to come to Assange’s aid before the new corrupt president of Ecuador sells him to Washington for muilti-millons of dollars by revoking his asylum.

When the story was printed in the Sydney Morning Herald, the incompetent or brainwashed, or bought-and-paid-for journalist, Nick Miller, wrote:

“Assange entered the embassy on June 19, 2012, after he had exhausted his appeals against an extradition order to go to Sweden to face rape and sexual assault allegations.
Swedish authorities have since closed their investigation, saying it couldn’t continue without Assange’s presence in their country.” https://www.smh.com.au/world/europe/australian-officials-spotted-in-mysterious-assange-visit-20180608-p4zk7w.html

Nick Miller has committed libel, whether from his ignorance or from pay.

There was no extradition order from Sweden for Assange to be returned to Sweden “to face rape and sexual assault allegations.” No such charges were issued by the Swedish prosecutorial office, and no such charges were made by the women involved.

The case had already been closed by the Swedish prosecutorial office, and the two women who willingly shared their beds with Assange did not press any charges. The Swedish female prosecutor, who many suspect reopened the closed case at the urging of Washington, wrote in the extradition request that she only wanted Assange for questioning.

Normally, extraditions are not granted for questioning. There has to be actual criminal charges, and there were no such charges against Assange. However, under pressure from Washington, a corrupt UK court granted, perhaps for the first time in history, extradition for questioning.

Assange’s attorneys understood that if Assange left his embassy refuge and travelled to Sweden to be questioned, there was nothing to prevent Sweden from turning him over to Washington to be tortured, as Washington does, into confession of some crime.

Consequently, Assange’s attorneys told the Swedish female prosecutor, a person who seems shortchanged on integrity, that Assange would be available for questioning in his place of refuge. The prosecutor, showing her hand, refused to question Assange in the Ecuadorian embassy in London. After refusing for many months while the presstitutes blackened Assange’s repution as a “rapist who was escaping justice,” the sort of ignorant nonsense that Nick Miller writes, the prosecutor consented to go to London to interview Assange.

As nothing incriminating emerged from the questioning and as neither of the women claimed that they were raped, the female prosecutorclosed the case for the second time. But the corrupt British would not release Assange. They claimed that he was wanted for jumping bail, an argument that made no sense as the charge for his arrest had been dismissed. But Washington insisted, and British “justice” again served Washington instead of justice.

The basis of the political assault on Assange came from the concern of one of his willing sex partners that he had not used a condom. With everyone worried crazy about HIV and Aids, the woman inquired at a Swedish public office if Assange could be required to take a HIV/Aids test. Assange, not realizing his vulnerability, apparently refused the test, and thus opened himself to a controversy that Washington immediately took advantage of.
It is safe for rock stars to have groupies, but not for truth-tellers.

If you understand the extreme extent to which the US government has gone, riding roughshod over many laws and traditions, to destroy Assange, perhaps you can understand the threats that the very few of us who have the education, experience, and integrity to tell you the truth live under.

When I write an article, it does not inform me. I already know. When I inform you, I am doing so at my risk. I am not going to take this risk if readers do not support this website. I do this for you. If it is not important to you, I have no need to do it.

You need to support truth-tellers as we are a disappearing breed under constant assault.

Dr. Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy and associate editor of the Wall Street Journal. He was columnist for Business Week, Scripps Howard News Service, and Creators Syndicate. He has had many university appointments. His internet columns have attracted a worldwide following.

After three years of relentless conflict, it has been estimated that out of a population of 27.4 million, 22.2 million people in Yemen are in need of humanitarian assistance, 17 million are food insecure, 14.8 million lack basic healthcare, 4.5 million children are suffering malnourishment, while 2.9 million people are internally displaced. As for dead and injured, the toll stands at almost 10,000 and 50,000 respectively.

As a result of the conflict, the country is also facing the "largest documented cholera epidemic of modern times." And this epidemic can only have been intensified by the Saudi bombing of a cholera treatment center in the west of the country, causing the French NGO Médecins Sans Frontières to halt their work at the facility.

Yet despite this mammoth scale in human suffering, the Saudi-led Sunni coalition's war not only continues, it has intensified with the unleashing of a massive air, land and sea offensive against the Houthi-controlled Red Sea port city of Hodeidah, one of the last remaining points of entry of food, medicines, and other essential humanitarian aid into the beleaguered country.

The more than three-year war on Yemen waged by a Western-backed Saudi coalition has been arguably genocidal from the outset, with up to eight million people facing imminent starvation due to the years-long blockade on the Arabian country, as well as from indiscriminate air strikes.

But the latest offensive on the Red Sea city of Hodeida threatens to turn the world’s already worst humanitarian disaster into a mass extermination.

Hodeida is the entry point for 90 per cent of all food and medical aid into Yemen. If the city’s port stops functioning from the military offensive – as UN aid agencies are warning – then an entire country population of more than 20 million will, as a result, be on the brink of death.

The Saudi coalition which includes Emirati forces and foreign mercenaries as well as remnants from the previous regime (which the Western media mendaciously refer to as “government forces”) is fully backed by the US, Britain and France. This coalition says that by taking Hodeida it will hasten the defeat of Houthi rebels. But to use the cutting off of food and other vital aid to civilian populations as a weapon is a blatant war crime. It is absolutely inexcusable.

This past week an emergency session at the UN Security Council made the lily-livered call for the port city to remain open. But it stopped short of demanding an end to the offensive being led by Saudi and Emirati forces against Hodeida, which is the second biggest stronghold for Houthi rebels after the capital Sanaa. The port city’s population of 600,000 is at risk from the heavy fighting underway, including air strikes and naval bombardment, even before food, water and medicines supply is halted.

Since the Security Council meeting was a closed-door session, media reports did not indicate which members of the council voted down the Swedish call for an immediate end to hostilities. However, given that three permanent members of the council, the US, Britain and France, are militarily supporting the Saudi-led offensive on Hodeida, one can assume that these states blocked the call for a cessation.

As the horror of Hodeida unfolds, Western media are reporting with a strained effort to whitewash the criminal role of the American, British and French governments in supporting the offensive. Western media confine their focus narrowly on the humanitarian plight of Hodeida’s inhabitants and the wider Yemeni population. But the media are careful to omit the relevant context, which is that the offensive on Hodeida would not be possible without the crucial military support of Western governments. If the Western public were properly informed, the uproar would be an embarrassing problem for Western governments and their servile news media.

What is notable in the Western media reportage is the ubiquitous descriptor when referring to the Houthi rebels. Invariably, they are described as “Iran-backed”. That label is used to implicitly “justify” the Saudi and Emirati siege of Hodeida “because” the operation is said to be part of a “proxy war against Iran”. The BBC, France 24, CNN, Deutsche Welle, New York Times and Washington Post are among media outlets habitually practicing this misinformation on Yemen.

Both Iran and the Houthis have said that there is no military linkage. Granted, Iran politically and diplomatically supports the Houthis, and the Yemeni population generally, suffering from the war. The Houthis share a common Shia Muslim faith as Iran, but that is a far cry from military involvement. There is no evidence of Iran being militarily involved in Yemen. The claim of a linkage relies heavily on assertion by the Saudis and Emiratis which is peddled uncritically by Western media. Even the US government has shied away from making forthright accusations against Iran supporting the Houthis militarily. Washington’s diffidence is a tacit admission that the allegations are threadbare. Besides, how could a country which is subjected to an illegal Saudi blockade of its land, sea and air routes conceivably receive weapons supplied from Iran?

By contrast, while the Western media repeatedly refer to the Houthis as “Iran-backed”, what the same media repeatedly omit is the descriptor of “American-backed” or “British and French-backed” when referring to the Saudi and Emirati forces that have been pounding Yemen for over three years. Unlike the breathless claims of Iranian linkage to the Houthis, the Western military connection is verified by massive weapons exports, and indeed coy admissions by Western governments, when they are put to it, that they are supplying fuel and logistics to aid and abet the Saudi and Emirati war effort in Yemen. 

Last week, the New York Times affected to lament the infernal conditions in Yemen as a “complex war”, as if the conflict is an unfathomable, unstoppable mystery. Why doesn’t the New York Times publish bold editorials bluntly calling for an end to US government complicity in Yemen? Or perhaps that is too “complex” for the Times’ editorial board?

The Washington Post also wrung its hands last week, saying: “The world’s most dire humanitarian crisis may get even worse. Emirati-led [and Saudi] offensive underway against port city of Hodeida, which is controlled by Iran-backed [sic] Houthi rebels.”

In its report, the Post did not mention the fact that air strikes by Saudi and Emirati forces are carried out with American F-15 fighter jets, British Typhoons and French Dassault warplanes. Incongruously, the Post cites US officials claiming that their forces are not “directly involved” in the offensive on the port city. How is that credible when air strikes are being conducted day after day? The Washington Post doesn’t bother to ask further.

In a BBC report last week also lamenting the “humanitarian crisis” in Hodeida, there was the usual evidence-free casual labelling of Houthi rebels as “Iran-backed”. But, incredibly, in the entire article (at least in early editions) there was not a single mention of the verifiable fact that the Saudi and Emirati military are supplied with billions-of-dollars-worth of British, American and French weapons.

In the final paragraph of its early edition of the report, the BBC editorializes: “In March 2015, Saudi Arabia and eight other mainly Sunni Muslim Arab states launched a military campaign to restore [exiled president] Hadi’s government after becoming alarmed by the rise of the Houthi group which they see as an Iranian Shia Muslim proxy.”

Note the BBC’s lame and unconvincing implication of Iran. This is a stupendous distortion of the Yemeni conflict by the British state-owned broadcaster which, astoundingly, or perhaps that should be audaciously, completely airbrushes out any mention of how Western governments have fueled the genocidal war on Yemen.

At the end of 2014, the American and Saudi puppet self-styled “president” Mansour Hadi was kicked out by a Yemeni popular revolt led by the Houthis, but not exclusive to these rebels. The Yemeni uprising involved Shia and Sunni. To portray Iran as sponsoring a Shia proxy is a vile distortion which the Saudis and their Western backers have used in order to justify attacking Yemen for the objective of re-installing their puppet, who has been living in exile in the Saudi capital Riyadh. In short, covering up a criminal war of aggression with lies.

In reality, the Yemen war is about Western powers and their Arab despot client regimes trying to reverse a successful popular revolt that aspired to bring a considerably more democratic government to the Arab region’s poorest country, overcoming the decades it languished as a Western, Saudi client kleptocracy.

For over three years, Saudi and Emirati forces, supported with Western warplanes, bombs, missiles, attack helicopters, naval power, and air refueling, as well as targeting logistics, have waged a non-stop bombing campaign on Yemeni civilians. Nothing has been off-limits. Hospitals, schools, markets, mosques, funerals, wedding halls, family homes, farms, water-treatment plants and power utilities, all have been mercilessly obliterated. Even graveyards have been bombed.

Even during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, the Saudi-led coalition – the supposed custodian of the two holy mosques of Mecca and Medina – has continued to massacre innocents from the air.

Elsewhere in the region, Western politicians and media have mounted hysterical protests against the Syrian government and its Russian ally when they have liberated cities from Western-backed terrorists, accusing Syria and Russia of “war crimes” and “inhuman sieges”. None of these hyperbolic Western media campaigns concerning Syria has ever been substantiated. Recall Aleppo? East Ghouta? The Syrian people have gladly returned to rebuild their lives now in peace under Syrian government protection after the Western terror proxies were routed. Western media claims about Syria have transpired to be outrageous lies, which have been hastily buried by the media as if they were never told in the first place. 

Yet in Yemen there is an ongoing, veritable genocidal war fully supported by Western governments. The latest barbarity is the siege of Hodeida with the callous, murderous objective of finally starving a whole population into submitting to the Western, Saudi, Emirati writ for dominating the country. This is Nuremberg-standard capital crimes.

With no exaggeration, Western news media are a Goebbels-like propaganda ministry – par excellence – whose duty is to whitewash genocide conducted by their governments. The barefaced lies and sly omissions being told about Yemen is one more reason among many reasons why the Western media have forfeited any vestige of credibility. They are serving as they usually do – Vietnam, Iraq, Libya, Syria among others – as accomplices in an epic war crime against Yemen.

Finian Cunningham has written extensively on international affairs, with articles published in several languages. He is a Master’s graduate in Agricultural Chemistry and worked as a scientific editor for the Royal Society of Chemistry, Cambridge, England, before pursuing a career in newspaper journalism. He is also a musician and songwriter. For nearly 20 years, he worked as an editor and writer in major news media organisations, including The Mirror, Irish Times and Independent.

In a recent article titled ‘Challenges for Resolving Complex Conflicts’, I pointed out that existing conflict theory pays little attention to the extinction-causing conflict being ongoingly generated by human over-consumption in the finite planetary biosphere (and, among other outcomes, currently resulting in 200 species extinctions daily). I also mentioned that this conflict is sometimes inadequately identified as a conflict caused by capitalism’s drive for unending economic growth in a finite environment.

I would like to explain the psychological origin of this biosphere-annihilating conflict and how this origin has nurtured the incredibly destructive aspects of capitalism (and socialism, for that matter) from the beginning. I would also like to explain what we can do about it.

Before I do, however, let me briefly illustrate why this particular conflict configuration is so important by offering you a taste of the most recent research evidence in relation to the climate catastrophe and biosphere annihilation and why the time to resolve this conflict is rapidly running out (assuming, problematically, that we can avert nuclear war in the meantime).

In an article reporting a recent speech by Professor James G. Anderson of Harvard University, whose research led to the Montreal Protocol in 1987 to mitigate CFC damage to the Ozone Layer, environmental journalistRobert Hunizker summarizes Anderson’s position as follows: ‘the chance of permanent ice remaining in the Arctic after 2022 is zero. Already, 80% is gone. The problem: Without an ice shield to protect frozen methane hydrates in place for millennia, the Arctic turns into a methane nightmare.’ See ‘There Is No Time Left’.

But if you think that sounds drastic, other recent research has drawn attention to the fact that the ‘alarming loss of insects will likely take down humanity before global warming hits maximum velocity…. The worldwide loss of insects is simply staggering with some reports of 75% up to 90%, happening much faster than the paleoclimate record rate of the past five major extinction events’. Without insects ‘burrowing, forming new soil, aerating soil, pollinating food crops…’ and providing food for many bird species, the biosphere simply collapses. See ‘Insect Decimation Upstages Global Warming’.

So, if we are in the process of annihilating Earth’s biosphere, which will precipitate human extinction in the near term, why aren’t we paying much more attention to the origin of this fundamental conflict? And then developing a precisely focused strategy for transcending it?

The answer to these two questions is simply this: the origin of this conflict is particularly unpalatable and, from my careful observation, most people, including conflict theorists, aren’t anxious to focus on it.

So why are human beings over-consuming in the finite planetary biosphere? Or more accurately, why are human beings who have the opportunity to do so (which doesn’t include those impoverished people living in Africa, Asia, Central/South America or anywhere else) over-consuming in the finite planetary biosphere?

They are doing so because they were terrorized into unconsciously equating consumption with a meaningful life by parents and other adults who had already internalized this same ‘learning’.

Let me explain how this happens.

At the moment of birth, a baby is genetically programmed to feel and express their feelings in response to the stimuli, both internal and external, that the baby registers. For example, as soon after birth as a baby feels hungry, they will signal that need, usually by crying or screaming. An attentive parent (or other suitable adult) will usually respond to this need by feeding the baby and the baby will express their satisfaction with this outcome, perhaps with a facial expression, in a way that most aware parents and adults will have no difficulty identifying. Similarly, if the baby is cold, in pain or experiencing any other stimulus, the baby will express their need, probably by making a loud noise. Given that babies cannot immediately use a cultural language, they use the language that was given to them by evolution: particularly audibly expressed noise of various types that an aware adult will quickly learn to interpret.

Of course, from the initial moments after birth and throughout the next few months, a baby will experience an increasing range of stimuli – including internal stimuli such as the needs for listening, understanding and love, as well as external stimuli ranging from a wet nappy to a diverse set of parental, social, climate and environmental stimuli – and will develop a diverse and expanding range of ways, now including a wider range of emotional expression but eventually starting to include spoken language, of expressing their responses, including satisfaction and enjoyment if appropriate, to these stimuli.

At some vital point, however, and certainly within the child’s first eighteen months, the child’s parents and the other significant adults in the child’s life, will start to routinely and actively interfere with the child’s emotional expression (and thus deny them satisfaction of the unique needs being expressed in each case) in order to compel the child to do as the parent/adult wishes. Of course, this is essential if you want the child to be obedient – a socially compliant slave – rather than to follow their own Self-will.

One of the critically important ways in which this denial of emotional expression occurs seems benign enough: Children who are crying, angry or frightened are scared into not expressing their feelings and offered material items – such as food or a toy – to distract them instead. Unfortunately, the distractive items become addictive drugs. Unable to have their emotional needs met, the child learns to seek relief by acquiring the material substitutes offered by the parent. But as this emotional deprivation endlessly expands because the child has been denied the listening, understanding and love to develop the capacity to listen to, love and understand themself, so too does the ‘need’ for material acquisition endlessly expand.

As an aside, this explains why most violence is overtly directed at gaining control of material, rather than emotional, resources. The material resource becomes a dysfunctional and quite inadequate replacement for satisfaction of the emotional need. And, because the material resource cannot ‘work’ to meet an emotional need, the individual is most likely to keep using direct and/or structural violence to gain control of more material resources in an unconscious and utterly futile attempt to meet unidentified emotional needs. In essence, no amount of money and other assets can replace the love denied a child that would allow them to feel and act on their feelings.

Of course, the individual who consumes more than they need and uses direct violence, or simply takes advantage of structural violence,to do so is never aware of their deeply suppressed emotional needs and of the functional ways of having these needs met. Although, I admit, this is not easy to do given that listening, understanding and love are not readily available from others who have themselves been denied these needs. Consequently,with their emotional needs now unconsciously ‘hidden’ from the individual, they will endlessly project that the needs they want met are, in fact, material.

This is the reason why members ofthe Rothschild family, Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, Amancio Ortega, Mark Zuckerberg, Carlos Slim, the Walton family and the Koch brothers, as well as the world’s other billionaires and millionaires, seek material wealth and are willing to do so by taking advantage of structures of exploitation held in place by the US military. They are certainly wealthy in the material sense; unfortunately, they are emotional voids who were never loved and do not know how to love themself or others now.

Tragically, however, this fate is not exclusive to the world’s wealthy even if they illustrate the point most graphically. As indicated above, virtually all people who live in material cultures have suffered this fate and this is readily illustrated by their ongoing excessive consumption – especially their meat-eating, fossil-fueled travel and acquisition of an endless stream of assets – in a planetary biosphere that has long been signaling ‘Enough!’

As an aside, governments that use military violence to gain control of material resources are simply governments composed of many individuals with this dysfunctionality, which is very common in industrialized countries that promote materialism. Thus, cultures that unconsciously allow and encourage this dysfunctional projection (that an emotional need is met by material acquisition) are the most violent both domestically and internationally. This also explains why industrialized (material) countries use military violence to maintain political and economic structures that allow ongoing exploitation of non-industrialized countries in Africa, Asia and Central/South America.

In summary, the individual who has all of their emotional needs met requires only the intellectual and few material resources necessary to maintain this fulfilling life: anything beyond this is not only useless, it is a burden.

If you want to read (a great deal) more detail of the explanation presented above, you will find it in‘Why Violence?’ and ‘Fearless Psychology and Fearful Psychology: Principles and Practice’.

So what can we do?

Well, I would start by profoundly changing our conception of sound parenting by emphasizing the importance of nisteling to children – see ‘Nisteling: The Art of Deep Listening’– and making‘My Promise to Children’.

For those adults who feel incapable of nisteling or living out such a promise, I encourage you to consider doing the emotional healing necessary by ‘Putting Feelings First’.

If you already feel capable of responding powerfully to this extinction-threatening conflict between human consumption and the Earth’s biosphere, you are welcome to consider joining those who are participating in the fifteen-year strategy to reduce consumption and achieve self-reliance explained in ‘The Flame Tree Project to Save Life on Earth’ and/or to consider using sound nonviolent strategy to conduct your climate or environment campaign. See Nonviolent Campaign Strategy.

You are also welcome to consider signing the online pledge of ‘The People’s Charter to Create a Nonviolent World’.

As the material simplicity of Mohandas K. Gandhi demonstrated: Consumption is not life.

If you are not able to emulate Gandhi (at least ‘in spirit’) by living modestly, it is your own emotional dysfunctionality – particularly unconscious fear – that is the problem that needs to be addressed.

Climate Change, as a global phenomenon, has come to be known as one of the most critical issues facing the humanity today, if not the most critical issue.  Many individuals, academic and  research institutions, including the global institutions such as IPCCC, WHO, UNEP etc., have tried to address this issue from different perspectives.

One such recent analysis has come to the conclusion that:

“Instead of the roughly 1,100 megawatts of carbon-free energy per day likely needed (to be added) to prevent temperatures from rising more than 2 ˚C, as the 2003 Science paper by Caldeira and his colleagues found, we are adding around 151 megawatts (of carbon free energy capacity per day). That’s only enough to power roughly 125,000 homes. At that rate, substantially transforming the energy system would take, not the next three decades, but nearly the next four centuries.”

Most of such analysis on Climate Change (especially those emanating from industrialised world) can be said to be guilty of focusing only on one issue i.e energy.  They all seem to focus only on different technologies to meet the insatiable demand for energy. A holistic and systemic approach to the phenomenon of Climate Change should reveal that the scenario is not as simple as these articles seem to make out.

The phenomenon of Climate Change has many other components to worry about as well, in addition to fossil fuel based energy systems. It is not just the transformation of energy scenario alone, which is required. We need an entirely different paradigm to the way we view the nature around us.

Even if we assume that the political willingness across the world will allow the possibility of moving over to 100% renewable energy (RE) based scenario by 2040/50, it may not suffice. The enormous number of solar PV modules, wind turbines, batteries, bio-energy units, geo-thermal units, hydropower units, computers, control systems, communication systems, protection systems, energy meters, associated transmission and distribution systems etc. required for such a scenario with a business as usual approach up to 2040/50 will be so much overwhelming that we may end up being the losers anyway.  Because, the total energy required by 2040/50 at the global level would have reached such high levels, if we continue with the energy demand growth rate as it is now (which may mean a CAGR of 3 to 5% between now and 2050).

In this context, the projected energy scenario in the case of India can be a good example for discussion. The national energy policy draft (by NITI Aayog, India) has projected that India’s (i) energy related Emissions per capita may increase from 1.2 tons of Carbon Dioxide Equivalent/capita in 2012 to 2.7-3.5 tons of Carbon Dioxide Equivalent/capita in 2040; (ii) Per capita electricity consumption may go up from 887 kWh in 2012 to 2,911-2,924 kWh in 2040; (iii) CAGR (Compound Annual Growth Rate) of electricity supply may be 5.5% between 2012-2040.  Most countries from the developing world are likely to have similar growth trajectory, because of which the total energy demand at the global level can be massive by 2040/50.

Even if the global energy demand growth rate between now and 2050 is assumed to grow only @ 1% CAGR, the total energy demand would have increased by about 100% as compared to that of the demand today. Even to meet this much energy demand the global economy has to manufacture enormous number of appliances/gadgets/machineries (to generate and distribute commercial forms of energy such as solar power, wind energy, bioenergy, hydel power etc.). Such a vast economic activity alone at the global scale will require the mining and processing of large quantities of the ores of iron, copper, aluminium and many kinds of rare earth minerals, which in turn will require large amounts of energy, most of which may have to come from conventional technology energy sources such as coal power technology. Hence by 2050, the total CO₂ emissions (or the total GHG emissions) would have gone much beyond 450 PPM as against the desired level of 350 PPM. And the CO₂, which would have been accumulating in the atmosphere during this period, will last for hundreds of years. The ability of various natural elements to control the temperature rise would have been severely curtailed. Many of the natural process, such as glacier melting and ocean acidification, would have become irreversible.  The forests and vegetation cover will have to come down considerably, and the pollution/contamination may exceed all limits.

It is well known that a MW equivalent of RE capacity will generate less than half of annual energy as compared to that of the same MW capacity of a conventional technology power plant, but will require more land area.  Hence a 100% RE dependent scenario will also need diversion of vastly more forest and agricultural land than otherwise.  This fact cannot be ignored either.

Hence, in order to visualise a 100% RE scenario as a major step in addressing the Climate Change threat, the global community will also need very many other enabling scenarios.

On a closer examination, all these issues can be intricately linked to the high GDP growth rate paradigm practiced by the governments around the world.  Can we even consider moving away from such an obsession and move over to a sustainable and inclusive growth paradigm?

A sustained high GDP growth rate will mean the manufacture of products and provision of services at an unprecedented pace leading to: setting up of more factories/ manufacturing facilities; consumption of large quantities of raw materials such as iron, steel, cement, chemicals etc.; increasing an unsustainable demand for natural resources such as land, water, minerals, timber etc.; acute pressure on the Government to divert agricultural /forest lands; huge demand for various forms of energy (petroleum products, coal, electricity etc.); accelerated urban migration; clamour for more of airports, airlines, hotels, shopping malls, private vehicles, express highways etc. Vast increase in each of these activities, while increasing the total greenhouse gas (GHG, responsible for global warming) emissions, will also add up to reduce the overall ability of natural carbon sinks such as forests to absorb GHG emissions. There will also be increased pollution of land, air and water along with huge issues of managing the solid, liquid and gaseous wastes. The corollary of all these issues is that the overall health of the humanity will go down drastically.

The multiplication of the size of global economy by 2040/50 would basically mean the multiplication of the demand for materials and energy; increase by several factors the production of wastes, contamination/pollution of air, water and soil; and corresponding increase in number of un-natural deaths, illnesses, accidents etc.

Whereas the nuclear power technology is being wrongly advocated by vested interests as a credible solution for the Climate Change, the associated radiation issues can only worsen the situation.  For countries like Bangladesh and many in African continent, which have so far a low energy carbon foot print, power generation capacity addition through coal and nuclear power plants can bring massive social, environmental and health problems.

Hence, the transformation of energy systems to renewable energy based system alone should not be our focus. The real issues must be: (a) how much minimum energy demand can we manage with in order to eradicate the poverty at the global levels; (b) how best to distribute this much energy in the most equitable way possible; (iii) how to produce this much of energy without adding to total GHG emissions from the energy sector; (d) and how to minimise the pollution/contamination/depletion of our natural resources in this process.

Even, this extraordinary approach may not be good enough.  In a business as usual scenario, by 2050 the forest/vegetation wealth may get degraded to a point of no return; the pollution and contamination of the air, water and soil may become unbearable because of the human activities such as transportation, manufacturing, entertainment, military operations, construction etc. Many other human activities, which were not needed by our ancestors or till recently, would have come to be deemed as essential by 2050. For example the huge demand for electronic, computer and communication devises. All these activities, which will need lot of energy, materials, water etc., and which will also produce waste/contaminants, will continue to drag us down the path of ecological disaster, even if 100% RE scenario is feasible by 2050.

The phenomenon of Global Warming can be basically associated with the vastly accelerated depletion/degradation of various elements of the nature; which is also known as the transgression of Planetary Boundaries.  So, in order to address this phenomenon, various activities of the humankind contributing to the accelerated depletion of the nature have to be thoroughly reviewed to ensure they become sustainable.

Hence, can we say that the humanity has a critical imperative to undertake urgently effective measures to minimise the consumption of water, materials (including even the forest based materials such as wood) and energy to a very low level starting from this moment? Only such an approach seems to be the lasting solution. This requires a paradigm shift in our lifestyle. Can we muster enough conviction and determination to move towards a vastly simpler lifestyle where we will be happy to share the locally available natural resources much more equitably than it is now; can this be as effective as our ancestors did?

Can we minimise the air travel, travel for pleasure etc.; can we minimise the movement of people and materials between provinces/regions/countries, and even within the countries; can we minimise the production of military wares, machines and ammunitions; can we reverse the trend of forest diversion and embark on massive afforestation to reverse the growing presence  of CO₂ in the atmosphere; can we stop diverting the agricultural lands, and embark on more of agroforestry; can we minimise the pollution/ contamination/ interference in the rivers and fresh water bodies as well as oceans; can we move over to a sustainable scenario of food production and consumption etc?

If large economies like China, India, Brazil, and other developing countries like Bangladesh, Pakistan, Indonesia, Philippines etc. adopt policies to grow their economies at high CAGR rates, can the global warming be satisfactorily addressed by transforming to 100% RE scenario alone?

How many of our on-going/projected problems due to Climate Change are likely to be addressed satisfactorily by 100% RE scenario alone?

How many of our political leaders and bureaucrats can be expected to have even a semblance of thinking on these lines?

What are our chances to avert the ecological disasters associated with the Climate Change without such paradigm shift to our lifestyle?

As a recent posting in The Guardian has said: “one reason we are failing to do what is necessary (for addressing the Climate Change) is because nature is still seen as “nice to have”, rather than essential in sustaining our health, wealth and security.  Many companies, economists and governments regard environmental destruction as a regrettable but inevitable consequence of economic growth – the “price of progress”. If we don’t change this mind-set, then there will be little prospect for the revolution in ideas that is needed to avoid a mass extinction event and disastrous climatic changes.”

This World Environment day requires every one of us to undertake serious introspection on these lines, instead of satisfying ourselves by just planting few tree samples here and there, while the natural elements such as forests and rivers are continued to be devastated everywhere.

Shankar Sharma, Power Policy Analyst, Mysore

Awareness on climate change and pollution has increased over the years though very little has been done to reduce pollution and protect environment. While Indian landmass is in the grip of extreme vagaries of climate, Himalayas too are being affected by increase in temperature.
According to latest scientific research that adds to data officially confirming the glacier loss of Indian Himalayas, the snout of the Pindari glacier in the upper himalayas of Kumaon region and the source to Pindar river has retreated over four decades. The findings of joint research by scientists from Kumoun University, Nainital, Uttarakhand, Space Application Centre, Dehradun: and Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, Kolkata may trigger more vigorous scientific study on other glaciers retreat in himalayas according to the report in the journal Remote Sensing and Environment. In an article ‘ Tracking Climate change:scientists confirm massive retreat of Pindari glacier in the Himalayas'(by TV Padma, scroll.in), the affects of retreat have been assessed. The scientists observed retreat of Pindari glacier by visual interpretation of remote sensing data and using global positioning system co- ordinates to determine latest snout position in 2014 and marked snout position using manually digitised records.

Climate change

Scientists compared the retreats of Pindari’s and other Himalayan glaciers and linked the shrinkage to climate change and warned about the implications of water storage as the Himalayas are life line of at least two major rivers Ganga and Brahmaputra which draw water. According to Govindaswamy Bala, climate change expert and professor at the Center for Atmospheric and Ocean Sciences, Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru, the Pindari’s retreat is in consistent with what is happening in the mountain glaciers all over the world due to climate change. ” The retreat clearly indicates the effects of historical warming” , he said. If the greenhouse gas emissions increase, the retreat may accelerate further.

Holistic approach

Thus, the water storing glaciers are under severe strain. The retreat of himalayan glaciers is jeopardizing our perennial nature of rivers and scientists are explaining the excessive melting of snows in central himalayas by ‘ atmospheric brown cloud’ and its effects. In an article, Kanak Mani Dixit opines of a new ‘ chipko’ like movement to protect environment.( To be an environmental world power,June 5 , 2018, thehindu.com)..

The problem should be tackled by all the south Asian countries. Himalayas must be protected by joint efforts of all the nations involved in the region. If water levels in the himalayan glaciers shrink, the rivers may dry up due to lack of sufficient water from the monsoon rains. Then, the problem of water shortage would extend to almost all months of the year. Hence, safeguarding mountain regions, the forests and glaciers in the region should be addressed urgently.

Sheshu Babu is a writer from anywhere and everywhere. Whenever he ponders on the question ‘ who am I?’ , he receives some response in a lyric by Bhupen Hazarika, (Assamese) ‘ ami ek jajabor ‘ translated into Hindi by Gulzar
‘ I am a gypsy
The earth has called me her own
And I have forgotten my home
(English)

We need to urgently cut carbon emissions and eventually cease greenhouse gas (GHG) pollution in coming decades. Ignored by Mainstream media is the need to drawdown atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) from the present dangerous and damaging 410 parts per million CO2 (410 ppm CO2) to a safe and sustainable 300 ppm CO2 i.e. negative GHG emissions. However a feasible, large-scale mechanisms for doing this, namely Direct Air Capture (DAC),  is  expensive, leaving future generations with an inescapable present Carbon Debt of about $130 trillion that is remorselessly increasing at about $10 trillion per year.

1. Required atmospheric CO2 drawdown to 300 ppm CO2.

The excellent climate activist organization 350.org, that was co-founded by American journalist Bill McKibben, demands a requisite CO2 draw-down to no more than 350 ppm CO2 that would roughly halve the Carbon Debt [1]. However scores of scientists and science-informed activists argue that a target of about 300 ppm CO2 is required for a safe and sustainable environment for all peoples and all species [2, 3], noting that  before the Industrial Revolution the atmospheric CO2 had not exceeded 280 ppm CO2 in the last 800,000 years.

Thus, for example, 23 eminent coral scientists  and biologists comprising  the technical working group on coral of  The Royal Society issued a report including following summation (2009): “The Earth’s atmospheric CO₂ level must be returned to <350ppm to reverse this escalating ecological crisis and to 320ppm to ensure permanent planetary health. Actions to achieve this must be taken urgently” [4].

Professor Ove Hoegh-Guldberg (leading coral scientist) (2009): “We are already well above the safe levels for the world’s coral reefs. The proposed 450ppm/2 degree target is dangerous for the world’s corals and for the 500 million people who depend on them. We should not go there, not only for reasons of coral reefs, but for the many other impacts that are extremely likely. We deduce, from the history of coral bleaching, that the safe level for coral reefs is probably about 320 or 325ppm [CO2]” [5].

Professor  James Hansen (leading climate scientist) and colleagues (2008): “Stabilization of Arctic sea ice cover requires, to first approximation, restoration of planetary energy balance. Climate models driven by known forcings yield a present planetary energy imbalance of +0.5-1 W/m2. Observed heat increase in the upper 700 m of the ocean confirms the planetary energy imbalance, but observations of the entire ocean are needed for quantification. CO₂ amount must be reduced to 325-355 ppm to increase outgoing flux 0.5-1 W/m2, if other forcings are unchanged. A further imbalance reduction, and thus CO₂ ~300-325 ppm, may be needed to restore sea ice to its area of 25 years ago” [6].

Dr T. Goreau (Jamaica delegation climate change expert making a scientific and technical briefing to the Association of Small Island States, UN Climate Change Conference, Copenhagen, Denmark) (2009): “The long-term sea level that corresponds to current CO2 concentration is about 23 meters above today’s levels, and the temperatures will be 6 degrees C higher. These estimates are based on real, long term climate records, not on models. We have not yet felt the real impacts of the current excess of greenhouse gases produced by fossil fuels, and the data shows that they will in the long run be many times higher than IPCC models project. In order to prevent these long term changes, CO2 must be stabilized at levels below preindustrial levels, around 260 parts per million. CO2 build up must be reversed,  not allowed to increase or even to be stabilized at 350 ppm, which would amount to a death sentence for coral reefs, small island developing states,  and billions of people living along low lying coast lines” [7].

Dr Andrew Glikson (an Earth and paleo-climate research scientist at Australian National University, Canberra, Australia) (2009): “For some time now, climate scientists warned that melting of subpolar permafrost and warming of the Arctic Sea (up to 4 degrees C during 2005–2008 relative to the 1951–1980) are likely to result in the dissociation of methane hydrates and the release of this powerful greenhouse gas into the atmosphere (methane: 62 times the infrared warming effect of CO₂ over 20 years and 21 times over 100 years) … The amount of carbon stored in Arctic sediments and permafrost is estimated as 500–2500 Gigaton Carbon (GtC), as compared with the world’s total fossil fuel reserves estimated as 5000 GtC. Compare with the 700 GtC of the atmosphere, which regulate CO₂ levels in the range of 180–300 parts per million and land temperatures in a range of about – 50 to + 50 degrees C, which allowed the evolution of warm blooded mammals. The continuing use of the atmosphere as an open sewer for industrial pollution has already added some 305 GtC to the atmosphere together with land clearing and animal-emitted methane. This raised CO₂ levels to 387 ppm CO₂ to date, leading toward conditions which existed on Earth about 3 million years (Ma) ago (mid-Pliocene), when CO₂ levels rose to about 400 ppm, temperatures to about 2–3 degrees C and sea levels by about 25 +/- 12 metres” [8].

Professor Hans Joachim Schellnhuber (director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research., Germany)  (2008): “It is a compromise between ambition and feasibility. A rise of 2^oC could avoid some of the big environmental disasters, but it is still only a compromise…It is a very sweeping argument, but nobody can say for sure that 330ppm is safe. Perhaps it will not matter whether we have 270ppm or 320ppm [CO2], but operating well outside the [historic] realm of carbon dioxide concentrations is risky as long as we have not fully understood the relevant feedback mechanisms” [280 ppm is the pre-industrial atmospheric CO2 concentration] [9].

David Spratt (leading Australian climate change analyst and activist on the website called “Climate Code Red”, the title of a key book by David Spratt and Phillip Sutton) (2009): “The central point is that Arctic sea-ice is undergoing dramatic loss in summer, having lost 70-80% of its volume in the last 50 years, most since 2000. Without summer sea-ice, Greenland cannot escape a trajectory of ice-sheet loss leading to an eventual sea-level rise of 7 metres. Regional temperatures in the Arctic autumn are already up about 5C, and by mid-century an Arctic ice-free in summer, combined with more global warming, will be pushing Siberia close to the point where large-scale loss of carbon from melting permafrost would make further mitigation efforts futile. As Hansen told the US Congress in testimony last year, the “elements of a perfect storm, a global cataclysm, are assembled”. In short, if you don’t have a target that aims to cool the planet sufficiently to get the sea-ice back, the climate system may spiral out of control, past many “tipping points” to the final “point of no return”. And that target is not 350ppm, it’s around 300 ppm. Hansen says Arctic sea-ice passed its tipping point decades ago, and in his presentations has also specifically identified 300-325ppm as the target range for sea-ice” [10].

Shaye Wolf  and Miyoko Sakashita (Center for Biological Diversity, San Francisco, California) (2009): “Given the documented detrimental impacts to corals at the current atmospheric CO2 concentration of ~387 ppm CO2, the best-available science indicates that atmospheric CO2 concentrations must be reduced to at most 350 ppm, and perhaps much lower (300-325 ppm CO2), to adequately reduce the synergistic threats of ocean warming, ocean acidification, and other impacts” [11]

2. Record GHG emissions and biodiversity loss.

The world scientific  community has been aware since the 1980s of the actual global warming impact of atmospheric greenhouse gases (GHGs) like carbon dioxide (CO2) and methane (CH4).  This awareness and concern was translated into the formation of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) by two United Nations organizations, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) [12]. Atmospheric CO2 has been monitored at Mauna Loa, Hawaii, since 1958 and has now reached a record 410 ppm CO2 and was increasing at a maximum rate of 3 ppm CO2 per year in recent years [13-15]. The highest annual average  atmospheric CO2 each year (it increases in the  Northern winter and decreases in the  Northern summer) has increased at an ever-increasing rate from 320 ppm CO2  in 1960 (increasing at 0.5 ppm CO2 per year) to 408 ppm CO2 in 2016 (increasing at 3.0 ppm CO2 per year). In 2017 the maximum CO2 at the Mauna Loa Observatory was 410 ppm CO2.

A neoliberal, profit-driven world in which Big Money determines politician and public perception of reality has been simply ignoring a quarter century of pleas for action from the world’s scientists. The present stupid,  ignorant, populist, anti-science and neoliberal president of the US , Donald Trump, is guided by powerful climate change denialists and has busily set about reversing what little was achieved by his predecessor Barack Obama, most notably green-lighting fossil fuel exploitation and withdrawing America from the Paris Climate Change Agreement.

In 2017 over 15,000 scientists  around the world signed a detailed statement  that we are badly running out of time to save the Planet from over-exploitation,  man-made global warming and massive biodiversity loss. This warning was backed by data on disastrous trajectories in 9 out of 10 key areas over the last 24 years, came  25 years after a similar warning by 1,700 scientists, coincided with the 2017 UN Climate Change Conference COP 23 in Bonn, and concluded “Time is running out” for action. Extrapolation from quasi-linear trajectories indicates a looming disaster in key areas, with man-made CO2 emissions increasing from 12.0 Gt (Gigatonnes or billion tonnes) CO2 per year in 1992 to 26.0 in 2016 to a projected 51.1 in 2040 [16, 17].

The Historical Carbon Debt (or Carbon 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 gone into the consequentially acidifying oceans) is about 1,850 billion tonnes CO2. Assuming a damage-related Carbon Price of US$200 per tonne CO2-equivalent [18],   this corresponds  to a Carbon Debt of $370 trillion, similar to the total wealth of the world and about 4.5 times the world’s total annual GDP. The world has a Carbon Debt of $370 trillion that is increasing at $13 trillion per year [19], and Australia (among world leaders in fossil fuel exploitation and climate change inaction [20, 21]), has a Carbon Debt of $7.5 trillion (A$10 trillion) that is increasing at $400 billion (A$533 billion) per year and at $40,000 (A$53,000) per head per year for under-30 year old Australians [19].

CO2 is presently about 0.041% by volume of the atmosphere (equal to 410 parts per million CO2 or 400 ppm CO2) which corresponds to approximately 3,200 gigatonnes (Gt) of CO2  (the molecular weight of CO2 is 44 and the atomic weight of C is 12, and thus the atmospheric C  = 3,200 Gt CO2 x (12 Gt C/44 Gt CO2) =   873 Gt of carbon (C)). Each part per million by volume (ppm) of CO2 in the atmosphere thus represents 3,200 Gt CO2/410 ppm CO2 = 7.8 Gt CO2 (2.13 Gt C) [22]. Lowering the atmospheric CO2 from the present 410 ppm CO2 to a requisite  300 ppm CO2 would mean removing 110 ppm CO2 x 7.8 Gt CO2 per ppm CO2 = 858 Gt CO2 i.e. a Carbon Debt of 858 Gt CO2. Assuming a damage-related Carbon Price of US$200 per tonne CO2-equivalent [18], this corresponds to a Carbon Debt of $172 trillion.

With atmospheric CO2 increasing at 3 ppm CO2 per year, the annual increase in Carbon Debt is 3 ppm CO2 x 7.8 Gt CO2 per ppm CO2 = 23.4 Gt CO2 or $4.7 trillion per year. However it gets worse. Thus World Bank analysts have revised annual GHG pollution by considering the contribution of methanogenic livestock production and attendant land use together with a Global Warming Potential of methane (CH4) that is 72 times that of CO2 on a horribly pertinent 20 year time frame  as compared to 21 on a 100 year  time scale (CH4 has a half-life  in the atmosphere of 8 years as compared to 100 years for CO2). The World Bank revised estimate increases the annual GHG pollution from 41.8 Gt CO2-equivalent (CO2-e)  to 63.8 Gt CO2-e [23], this latter figure corresponding to an annual increase in Carbon Debt of 63.8 Gt CO2-e  x $200 per t CO2-e = $12.8 trillion or $1,701 each for every one of the present 7.5 billion human beings [24]. One notes that the world average GDP per capita is presently about $10,000 [25]. Further,  the annual increase in global Carbon Debt of $12.8 trillion may be an under-estimate because the Global Warming Potential  of CH4 on a 20 year time frame is 105 if atmospheric aerosol  impacts are considered [26].

Unlike conventional debt that can be expunged by default, bankruptcy, or printing money,   Carbon Debt is inescapable. Thus with a world facing a circa 1 metre sea level rise this century, coastal cities and populations will drown if sea walls are not built or the populations are not relocated to zones safe from sea surges due to warming-intensified storms. Carbon Debt involves immense climate criminality, intergenerational inequity and intergenerational injustice [27, 28]. If the young fully realized the awful extent of the worsening and inescapable Carbon Debt to be paid by future generations there would be a (hopefully non-violent) Climate Revolution [29].

The forgoing estimate of annual Carbon Debt increase does not take into account the cost of human lives lost to global warming impacts. Thus climate change is already killing an estimated 0.4 million people each year [30], although this may be a considerable under-estimate because climate change disproportionately  impacts the tropical and sub-tropical Developing World in which 16 million people die avoidably from deprivation each year [31]. Indeed carbon fuel burning is associated with toxic air pollutants (notably fine carbon particulates and nitrogen oxides) that eventually kill about 7 million people each year [32]. Several leading climate scientists have estimated that only 0.5 billion people will survive this century if man-made climate change is not requisitely addressed, this predicting a Climate Genocide in which 10 billion people would perish this century at a average rate of 100 million per year [33].

The risk avoidance-based Value of a Statistical Life (VOSL) is about $9 million for Americans [34]  and on  the basis of “all men are created equal” could thus apply to all Humanity in an ideal world. On the basis of a $9 million per person VOSL, the annual cost of fossil fuel burning and/or global warming  could be $3.6 trillion (0.4 million climate change-related deaths pa), $63 trillion (7 million pollution-related deaths pa), $144 trillion (16 million climate change-impacted  global avoidable deaths from deprivation pa), and $900 trillion (adumbrated average of 100 million deaths pa from unaddressed climate change this century).

We have the extraordinary situation today of deadly Trump American inaction over a worsening climate emergency and a worsening climate genocide as compared to a commitment to a long-term accrual cost of $6 trillion for the endless War on Terror  – yet there are 400,000 climate change-related deaths globally annually (climate terrorism victims)  versus an average of 4 US deaths annually in America from political terrorism  since 9-11. Similarly, since 9-11 there have been 3.3 million US air pollution deaths (carbon terrorism) versus 60 US political terrorism deaths in America [35, 36]. The 3.3 million US air pollution deaths since 9-11 from carbon fuel burning pollutants translates to a “wasted” risk avoidance-based cost of $30 trillion

The Carbon Debt transcends measurability when one considers  the worsening desertification, salinization, deforestation, ocean resource depletion, speciescide,  ecocide  and omnicide  associated with burgeoning human population and inextricably linked GHG pollution associated with increased urban industrial activity and  agricultural methanogenic livestock-related land use.

According to  biologists Drs Phillip Levin and Donald Levin (2002): “Rates of extinction appear now to be 100 to 1,000 times greater than background levels, qualifying the present as an era of “mass extinction”” [37]. A letter signed by over 15,000 scientists in 2017 documented massive over-exploitation,  man-made global warming and massive biodiversity loss,  declaring that “Moreover, 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” [16]. We cannot destroy what we cannot replace. In 2017 a  Leonardo Da Vinci painting sold at auction for $450 million but a same-size faithful reproduction  of this work could be generated for a mere few dollars.  In contrast, any species is essentially priceless – it cannot be reproduced once it has been rendered extinct.  Attempts have been made to quantify the economic value of the Biosphere. Thus Costanza et al. (1997) estimated the aggregated annual value of nature’s services (updated to 2000 US $) to lie in the range $18 – $61 trillion [38, 39]. Dr Andrew Balmford et al. (2002) estimated that “our current undervaluation of nature is reflected in marked underinvestment in reserves. To the best of our knowledge the world spends (in 2000 US $) ~ $6.5 billion each year on the existing reserve network… the total cost of an effective, global reserve programme on land and at sea is some $45 billion per year. This sum dwarfs the current $6.5 billion annual reserve budget yet could be readily met by redirecting less than 5% of existing perverse subsidies… our hypothetical global reserve network would ensure the delivery of goods and services with an annual value (net of benefits  from conversion) of between ~ $4400 and $5200 billion [$4.4-$5.2 trillion pa], depending on the level of resource use permitted within protected areas, and with the lower number coming from a network entirely composed of strictly protected reserves…  The benefit : cost ratio of a reserve system meeting minimum safe standards is therefore around 100 : 1” [38].

3. Unavoidable catastrophic plus 2C and the near-terminal Methane Bomb.

The global warming  trajectory gets even worse still if one considers the Methane Bomb of the Arctic tundra and Arctic Ocean sea bed [40-45]. The Global Warming Potential (GWP) of CH4 is 21 times that of CO2 on a 100 year time frame but is 105 times greater than that of CO2 on a 20 year time frame and taking atmospheric  aerosol  impacts into account [26]. Huge stores of CH4 as water-methane (H2O-CH4) clathrates  in the Arctic  tundra permafrost and on the Arctic Ocean sea bed may be released in coming decades due to global warming, with this release involving a disastrous positive feedback loop in which global warming causes CH4 release, thence more global warming and consequently even more CH4 release.  Atmospheric CH4 increased in 1983-1998 by up to 13 ppb (parts per billion) per year, increased much more slowly in the period 1999-2006 (up to 3 ppb per year, the 2001-2005 average being 0.5 ppb/year),  and has increased more rapidly from 2007 onwards, reaching 12.5 ppb per year in 2014.  Atmospheric CH4 increased  to 1,843 ppb CH4 in  December 2015 [41] as compared to a pre-Industrial Revolution level of 700 ppb CH4 [15].

Professor Peter Wadhams (professor of Ocean Physics, and Head of the Polar Ocean Physics Group in the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics, 90-Nobel-Laureate University of Cambridge, UK)  and colleagues on the threat of 50Gt methane from East Siberian Arctic Shelf (2013): “Economic time bomb. As the amount of Arctic sea ice declines at an unprecedented rate, the thawing of offshore permafrost releases methane. A 50-gigatonne (Gt) reservoir of methane, stored in the form of hydrates, exists on the East Siberian Arctic Shelf. It is likely to be emitted as the seabed warms, either steadily over 50 years or suddenly” [42]. However the Global Warming Potential (GWP) of CH4 on a 20 year time frame and with aerosol impacts considered is 105 times that of CO2 [26] .   The German WBGU (2009) and the Australian Climate Commission (2013) have estimated that no more than a Terminal Carbon Pollution Budget of 600 billion tonnes of CO2 can be emitted between 2010 and zero emissions in 2050 if the world is to have a 75% chance of avoiding a catastrophic 2C temperature  rise  [46, 47]. That Terminal Carbon Pollution Budget has now effectively been exceeded [48]. Indeed climate criminal Australia’s commitment to fossil fuel exploitation  means that Australia is set to exceed the world’s 2009 Terminal Carbon Pollution Budget by a factor of 3 [49]. However the 50 Gt (billion tonnes) CH4 in the East Siberian Arctic Shelf is thus equivalent to 50 billion tonnes CH4 x 105 tonnes  CO2-equivalent/tonne CH4 = 5,250 billion tonnes CO2-e or about nine (9) times more than the world’s remaining Terminal  Carbon Pollution Budget in 2009. We are doomed unless we can stop this Arctic CH4 release.

4. The cost of Direct Air Capture, Biochar & other CO2 drawdown systems.

(A). Direct Air Capture (DAC).

The Direct Air Capture (DAC) system captures as water-insoluble calcium carbonate (CaCO₃)  all the CO2 in the incoming air stream (circa 80% nitrogen, N₂; 20% oxygen, O₂; 0.04% CO₂) by passage through a lime solution of calcium ions (Ca^2+ )  and hydroxyl  ions (OH^– ) . The  calcium carbonate is then heated to generate lime (calcium oxide, CaO) and a stream of circa 100% carbon dioxide (CO₂) which can then be compressed and hopefully permanently sequestered [50](e.g. in deep ocean, in underground in spaces from former coal or gas extraction or by underground reactions to form carbonates with basalt rocks) [50]. Note that in chemistry carbon dioxide is denoted as CO₂ but for convenience I have used CO2 elsewhere in this essay  except for chemical equations such as those below summarizing the key steps of DAC:

(a) CO2 (CO₂) scrubbed out of air by passage through lime solution (Ca²⁺  + 2 OH^– ) in water (H₂O) to form carbonate ions (CO₃^2-):  CO₂ + 2OH^– -> CO₃^2- + H₂O

(b) Carbonate (CO₃^2-  ) precipitated as calcium carbonate (CaCO₃ ): Ca²⁺ + CO₃^2-  -> CaCO₃

(c) Lime (calcium oxide, CaO) regenerated by heating calcium carbonate (CaCO₃) with the resultant CO₂ being sequestered :  CaCO₃ -> CaO + CO₂ -> CO₂ sequestered.

(d) Lime (CaO) dissolved in water (H₂O): CaO + H₂O -> Ca²⁺  + 2 OH^–  .

A pilot plant has been constructed that sequesters 1 Mt CO2 per year (equivalent to annual emissions of 250,000 average cars) at a cost of $100-150 per tonne of CO2 captured, purified, and compressed to 150 bar [50]. To get the atmospheric CO2 back to 300 ppm CO2 from the present 410 ppm CO2 we would have to lower the atmospheric  CO2 by 110 ppm CO2 by removing 3,200 Gt CO2 x (110/410) = 859 Gt CO2 (234 Gt C). Doing sequestration of 859 Gt CO2 by DAC at $100 per tonne of CO2 sequestered would cost 859 Gt CO2 x $100/ t CO2 = 85,900 billion = $85.9 trillion but at $150 per tonne of CO2 sequestered  it would cost $128.9 trillion (one notes that at a damage –related carbon price of  $200 /tonne CO2-e  [18 ] getting back to 300 ppm CO2 would cost 859 Gt CO2 x  $200 /t CO2-e = $171.8 trillion).

Burning  thermal coal on average yields 2.129 tonnes CO2 per tonne coal (2.622 tonnes CO2 per tonne anthracite  coal) [54] . In April 2018 the present price of coal is US$94.21 per tonne coal but the price has been in the range $50-100 per tonne coal in the period 2014-2018. At $100 per tonne of coal, the Carbon Price in US dollars per tonne CO2 is accordingly $100 per tonne coal x (tonne coal/2.129 t CO2 = $47.0/t CO2 or about 3 times less than the upper estimate of DAC-based CO2 sequestration of $150 per tonne of CO2 sequestered.

Thus at a coal price of $100 per tonne coal, for every $1 received for coal leading to coal-based CO2 pollution it will cost future generations $3 to sequester the CO2. If the coal price is $50 per tonne, for every $1 received for coal-based CO2 pollution it will cost future generations $6.4 in today’s dollars  to sequester the CO2. Indeed  the coal price is set to fall until it reaches zero when coal mining is banned in a world that finally comes to its senses.

(B). Biochar Carbon, C, charcoal).

One could envisage a sane world building sufficient DAC plants to get us back to 300 ppm CO2 (by removing 859 Gt CO2 from the atmosphere) within a decade at a cost of $9-13 trillion dollars per year. However a nicer approach would be to get rid of atmospheric CO2 by O2 (oxygen)-yielding photosynthetic capture of CO2 as cellulose or related insoluble polysaccharides (CH₂O)_n) and thence converting such cellulosic material to Biochar (carbon, C) by heating in anaerobic conditions to circa 700C (anaerobic pyrolysis):

(a) fixing CO2 as cellulose via solar-energy-driven photosynthesis:  nCO₂ + nH₂O -> (CH₂O)_n + O₂

(b) anaerobic pyrolysis of waste wood and straw ((CH₂O)_n) to yield carbon (C, charcoal, Biochar):  (CH₂O)_n  -> nC + n H₂O.

The Biochar (carbon, C, charcoal )  can then be buried in fire-proof holes in the ground (old coal mines) or added to soil (the Amazonian Indians discovered that Biochar – charcoal or “terra preta” – was an agriculturally very beneficial additive to soil [56]. Without diverting arable land to Biochar production, we could presently obtain about 12 Gt of cellulosic carbon each year from the following sources: 1.7 GtC/yr  (straw from agriculture) +  4.2 GtC/yr  (total grass upgrowth from grasslands upgrowth)  + 6 GtC/yr (possible sustainable wood harvest) = 11.9 GtC/yr [57]. From this one can see why Biochar expert Professor Johannes Lehmann of Cornell University was correct in   calculating that it is realistically possible to fix 9.5Gt C (34.9 Gt CO2) per year as Biochar, noting that global annual production of carbon from burning fossil fuels is about 9GtC (33.0 Gt CO2)[58, 59].

In order to get back to 300 ppm CO2 we would need to remove 859 Gt CO2 (234 Gt C), and at 9.5 Gt C per year this would take 234 Gt C x (year/ 9.5 Gt C) = 24.6 years. However a realistic assessment  is that carbon sequestration as Biochar could amount to only  2.2 GtC annually by 2050 [60] and at this rate it would take 234 Gt C x (year/ 2.2 Gt C) = 106 years to draw down CO2 to 300 ppm CO2.

A further crucial question here is how much does it cost to produce Biochar? Based  on biomass from sustainable forest, non-farm and ranch-based feedstock production, the total cost of Biochar is  $194- $424 per ton of cellulosic ((CH₂O)_n ) feedstock and every 30 t cellulose feedstock generates 12 t Biochar (C ). Accordingly the cost of Biochar is $194-$424 per t cellulose x (30 t cellulose/ 12 t C) = $485-  $1,060/t C or  $485-  $1,060/t C x (12 t C/ 44 t CO2) = $132-$289 /t CO2.

At $100 per tonne of coal, the Carbon Price in US dollars per tonne CO2 is accordingly $100 per tonne coal x (tonne coal/2.129 t CO2 = $47.0/t CO2 i.e. about 2.8-6.1 times or roughly 3-6 times  less than the cost of removing the CO2 as Biochar. A coal price of $50 per tonne corresponds to $23.5/t CO2 which is 6-12 times less than the cost of removing the CO2 as Biochar.

(C). Accelerated Weathering of Limestone (AWL).

The waste gas from burning coal or gas is passed through a sea water-limestone (CaCO₃) scrubber to generate bicarbonate ions (HCO₃ ^–): CO₂ (gas) + CaCO₃ (solid) + H₂O <-> Ca²⁺ (aqueous) + 2 HCO₃ ^– (aqueous) . The scrubbing solution is then piped to the sea [62-66]. Carbon in the oceans as bicarbonate is 10 times that in all recoverable fossil fuel reserves and about 60 times that in the CO2 in the atmosphere. The carbon in carbonate minerals is about 4,000 times greater than the carbon in oil and coal fossil fuel reserves and the AWL process would in part reverse the deleterious acidification of the oceans due to the massive CO2 pollution of the atmosphere [15].

The main problems with the AWL system are that ideally it would involve CO2-producing cement factories and fossil fuel-based power stations (which we want to abolish)  being located adjacent to the sea and limestone deposits (so that the CO2-rich flue gas could be  passed through limestone suspensions in sea water (but can you imagine the British demolishing the iconic White Cliffs of Dover and Eastbourne?)

G.H. Rau has proposed an electrochemically accelerated   version of such sequestration: “ Electrochemical splitting of calcium carbonate (e.g., as contained in limestone or other minerals) is explored as a means of forming dissolve hydroxides for absorbing, neutralizing, and storing carbon dioxide, and for restoring, preserving, or enhancing ocean calcification. While essentially insoluble in water, CaCO3 can be dissolved in the presence of the highly acidic anolyte of a water electrolysis cell. The resulting charged constituents, Ca2+ and C03(2-), migrate to the cathode and anode, respectively, forming Ca(OH)2 on the one hand and H2CO3 (or H2O and CO2) on the other. By maintaining a pH between 6 and 9, subsequent hydroxide reactions with CO2 primarily produce dissolved calcium bicarbonate, Ca(HCO3)2aq. Thus, for each mole of CaCO3 split there can be a net capture of up to 1 mol of CO2. Ca(HCO3)2aq is thus the carbon sequestrant that can be diluted and stored in the ocean, in natural or artificial surface water reservoirs, or underground. The theoretical work requirement for the reaction is 266 kJe per net mole CO2 consumed. Even with inefficiencies, a realized net energy expenditure lower than the preceding quantity appears possible considering energy recovery via oxidation of the H2 produced. The net process cost is estimated to be <$100/tonne CO2 mitigated. An experimental demonstration of the concept is presented, and further implementation issues are discussed” [66].

Setting aside the limitations of this proposed AWL technology (it would be most effective when associated with coastally-located cement plants or coal- or gas-burning power stations, polluting plants that we want to eliminate), a  cost of $100 per tonne CO2 sequestered by AWL would mean that for every tonne of CO2 thus sequestered as bicarbonate, at $100 per tonne of coal the cost would be $100 per tonne CO2 sequestered/$47.0 per tonne CO2 generated = 2.1 times the amount received for the coal generating that tonne of CO2 on combustion. At a coal price of $50 per tonne, the cost would be $100 per tonne CO2 sequestered/$23.5 per tonne CO2 generated = 4.3 times the amount paid for the coal. Accordingly, the cost of removing CO2 by AWL is 2.1-4.3 times greater than the price received by climate criminals for the thermal coal.

(D). Mineral carbonation.

Mineral carbonation involves reaction of CO2 with minerals using  wollastonite (CaSiO₃) or steel slag as feedstock. W.J.J Huijgen et al.: “A cost evaluation of CO₂ sequestration by aqueous mineral carbonation has been made using either wollastonite (CaSiO₃) or steel slag as feedstock. First, the process was simulated to determine the properties of the streams as well as the power and heat consumption of the process equipment. Second, a basic design was made for the major process equipment, and total investment costs were estimated with the help of the publicly available literature and a factorial cost estimation method. Finally, the sequestration costs were determined on the basis of the depreciation of investments and variable and fixed operating costs. Estimated costs are 102 and 77 €/ton CO₂ [$111 and $84] net avoided for wollastonite and steel slag, respectively. For wollastonite, the major costs are associated with the feedstock and the electricity consumption for grinding and compression (54 and 26 €/ton CO₂ [$59 and $28] avoided, respectively). A sensitivity analysis showed that additional influential parameters in the sequestration costs include the liquid-to-solid ratio in the carbonation reactor and the possible value of the carbonated product. The sequestration costs for steel slag are significantly lower due to the absence of costs for the feedstock. Although various options for potential cost reduction have been identified, CO₂ sequestration by current aqueous carbonation processes seems expensive relative to other CO₂ storage technologies. The permanent and inherently safe sequestration of CO₂ by mineral carbonation may justify higher costs, but further cost reductions are required, particularly in view of (current) prices of CO₂ emission rights. Niche applications of mineral carbonation with a solid residue such as steel slag as feedstock and/or a useful carbonated product hold the best prospects for an economically feasible CO₂ sequestration process” [67].

Setting aside the large-scale feasibility of this mineral carbonation technology, an IPCC Report estimates the cost of mineral carbonation at $50-$100 per tonne CO2 sequestered [17]. At a coal price of $50 per tonne,   that would mean that for  every tonne of CO2 thus sequestered as magnesium carbonate , the cost would be $50-$100 per tonne CO2 / $47.0/t CO2 = 1.1- 2.1 times the amount received for the coal generating that tonne of CO2 on combustion i.e. for every $1 received for coal about $1.1- $2.1 would have to be paid for subsequent CO2 removal through mineral carbonation. At a coal price of $100 per tonne, the cost of CO2 removal would be  $50-$100 per tonne CO2 / $23.5/t CO2 = 2.1-4.3 times the mine gate receipt for the coal

(E).  Carbon Capture and Sequestration  (CCS).  

Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS)  involves concentrating  CO2 as a liquid , piping it  to a suitable location and then storing  it  underground or at the bottom of the ocean [68-71]. The economic and practical difficulties of CCS mean that it has yet to be applied on a large scale. The IPCC reports that the cost of such capture from a coal- or gas-fired power station would be up to $75 per tonne CO2 sequestered [68] . The Global CCS Institute states (2011): “The cost of mitigating, or avoiding, CO₂ emissions for a coal power plant fitted with current CCS technology ranges from US$23-92 per tonne of CO₂ and is a little higher for natural gas fuelled power plants” [70].

For coal burning–based power plants the cost of CCS is $35-$83 per tonne CO2 sequestered [71]. At a mine gate coal price of $100 per tonne, the cost of CO2 removal by CCS would be $35-$83 per tonne CO2 / $47.0/t CO2 = 0.7-1.8.times the amount received for the coal generating that tonne of CO2 on combustion i.e. for every $1 received for coal about $0.7- $1.8 would have to be paid for subsequent CO2 removal. At a mine gate coal price of $50 per tonne, the cost of CO2 removal by CCS would be $35-$83 per tonne CO2 / $23.5/t CO2 = 1.5-3.5 times the amount received for the coal generating that tonne of CO2 on combustion.

(F). Photosynthesis-based CO2 sequestration via re-afforestation and fertilizing the oceans.

After centuries of de-forestation, net loss of forests has ceased in North America and Europe but continues apace at 7.3 million hectares per year in Latin America, the Developing World and Australia [72]. Thus rich, climate criminal Australia is not only among world leaders in terms of per capita greenhouse gas pollution [20, 21] and climate change inaction (ranking 57 out of 60 countries on a climate change performance index) [73],  but it also ranks with Brazil  among world leaders in land clearance) [74, 75]. Paradoxically, the South East  Australian native Eucalyptus forests are World’s best forest carbon sinks –  14 million hectares, 25.5 Gt CO2, and a loss of 460 Mt CO2/year avoided for next 100 years if retained [76]. Re-afforestation, while desirable, would come at the expense of arable land in a hungry world that is suffering remorseless  population increase in the face of loss of arable land through urbanization, desertification, salinization and global warming-driven sea level rise.

Fertilization of the oceans to promote the growth of photosynthetic algae has been proposed as a geoengineering solution to rising atmospheric CO2 [77-81]. However CO2 could be released from dead plankton through oxidation rather than evading the carbon cycle and falling out of circulation to the ocean bottom. Further, it has been surmised that blooming algae could actually promote warming of the Arctic [81].  And of course if the remorselessly destructive continuation of the circa 10,000 year-old Anthropocene Era has taught us anything  it is that gross  interference with ecosystems that have evolved over millions of years is very likely to be catastrophically and indeed terminally destructive of ecosystems and species.

Final comments and conclusions.

A catastrophic plus 2C temperature rise is now unavoidable but decent people are obliged to do everything  they can to make the future “less bad” for their children, grandchildren and for future generations. Arrayed against the young is the sustained mendacity of the neoliberal One Percenters who possess 50% of the world’s wealth. While buffoons like Donald Trump can bluster absurd and dangerous climate change denialism, a more insidious  neoliberal agenda has been promotion of the dangerous  “coal to gas transition” favoured by his predecessor Barack Obama. Methane (CH4) (about 85% of natural gas)  has a Global Warming Potential  (GWP) that is  105 times greater than that of  CO2 on a 20 year time frame and taking aerosol impacts into account. Methane leaks (3.3% in the US based on the latest US EPA data and as high as 7.9% for methane from “fracking” coal seams)  and thus a 2.6 % leakage of CH4 yields the same greenhouse effect as burning the remaining 97.4% CH4. Accordingly, depending  upon the degree of systemic gas leakage,   gas burning for electricity  could be much dirtier than coal burning greenhouse gas-wise (GHG-wise) [43, 82].

In addition to urgent cessation of carbon fuel burning, there must be “negative CO2 emissions” to drawdown atmospheric CO2 to a safe and sustainable  level of about 300 ppm CO2 from the present damaging and dangerous 410 ppm CO2.  Of the 6 systems analysed here, Direct Air Capture (DAC) and Biochar are the most feasible. However a realistic assessment  is that carbon sequestration as Biochar could amount to only  2.2 GtC annually by 2050 [60] and at this rate it would take 106 years to drawdown atmospheric CO2 to 300 ppm CO2.

The upper cost estimate for DAC is $150 per tonne CO2 sequestered but a coal price of $50 per tonne means $23.5 per tonne CO2 produced on combustion –  thus  on this basis, for every $1 paid for coal today, future generations will have to pay 6.4 times that amount in today’s dollars to sequester the CO2 by DAC. This represents  unconscionable intergenerational theft and intergenerational injustice through imposed Carbon Debt that the young should simply not tolerate [27-29, 83]. Unlike conventional debt that be variously evaded by default, bankruptcy or printing money,  Carbon Debt is inescapable – if the sea wall is not built the city will drown.

Young people and those who care for them must (a) inform everyone they can, (b) demand rapid cessation of carbon fuel burning, (c)  demand rapid  atmospheric CO2 drawdown to a safe and sustainable 300 ppm CO2, and  (d) urge and apply Boycotts, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) against all those people, politicians , parties, companies,  corporations and countries disproportionately complicit in the worsening Climate Emergency and Climate Crisis. There is no Planet B.

However, looking at the graph, it is clear that the assumption of unchecked exponential growth makes no sense. An extrapolation of the historical annual growth rate (39.14%) means that the final doubling of capacity occurs in the last 25.2 months. Huge productions facilities would have to be built for the necessary solar panel and wind turbines – to be used only for a very short time.

Most scientist and economists are aware of this, but I have experienced many lay people and politicians taking “exponential problem solving” at face value. Which may be a problem.

Renewable energy capacity growth as an example

What would a more realistic model be? As a biologist, I am acquainted with logistic growth models limited by a capacity factor such as the available food or land. But organisms will reproduce until the capacity is exhausted, often going into overshoot followed by a period of population collapse (die-off). Humans have foresight (at least sometimes). Investors calculate the profitability of investments.

Bardi & Sgouridis 2017 evaluate the effect of time of return of energy investment of renewable energy production installations (e.g. photovoltaic installations, wind parks). In my understanding, this is relevant but different from the effect of the economic return of investment on the factories producing the solar panels, wind turbines, etc. What effect does a minimum life-span of these factories have on the energy transition? As I could not find a publication (please comment, if you know one!), I decided to investigate this.

What follows is a small calculation of the effect of the constraint that production facilities have a minimum lifespan to produce a return on investment. Note that this is not a realistic model aimed at making actual predictions. I think of it as a thought experiment to estimate the difference between exponential growth, and reasonable return-of-investment on production facilities under otherwise ideal growth conditions. Basically, I assume that any new factory should be running, with reinvestments and upgrades, for 30 years. The following indented text documents the assumptions behind the model (skip ahead, if you like).

The resulting graph looks like:

What did I learn?

“Exponential growth” only matters in the beginning. The vast majority of the capacity increase happens between 2027 and 2051 in a near-linear fashion. Under the parameters chosen, only 7.8% of the capacity is produced under a near-exponential growth model. Clearly, this result depends on the growth rate and the expected lifespan of production facilities solar panels, wind turbines, etc. The result will be similar whenever the factory lifespan is similar to the time it takes to reach the capacity growth target.

Some additional, minor observations (skip ahead, if you like):

General Conclusions

The idea that a future acceleration of technological progress at an exponential rate will solve many problems has several proponents, the best known of which are perhaps Diamandis & Kotler. Their 2012 book has been widely reviewed and criticized. Patrick Tucker (2012, An Awesome Adventure to the Future) applauds them for encouraging the view that problems can be solved. But as Dale Carrico (2012, Schlock and Awesome; Or, The Futurists Are Worse Than You Think) points out, uncritical wishful thinking without regard to problems and limitations is “escapism from the real present, what it offers as solutions are nothing but distractions from problems”. Gregor Macdonald (2012. ‘Cornucopians in Space’ Deliver a Dangerously Misguided Message – Optimism has its dangers) notes that Diamandis “is an adherent to the notion that exponential growth in technology will eventually reach a crescendo, thus offering humankind super-solutions at a kind of hyperspeed rate of change.” But while technological progress is helpful and welcome, “the magnitude of the world’s present challenges cannot wait for the array of potential solutions that may start to work”. He warns that “celebrating the success of solutions before they have actually arrived – indeed, well before they have arrived, is no solution at all”. Michael Marien (2012, globalforesightsbooks Book of the Month) observes that the “techno-ecstatic focus of Singularity … serves to obscure the need for “soft” social technology that is of equal if not greater importance” and “questions are ignored about how the new abundance will be distributed in a world of massive and increasing inequality, where many governments are running huge deficits and hamstrung by ideological gridlock and obsolete ideas”, conceding that “As inspirational futurism suggesting possibilities of a better world for all, there are certainly many good budding ideas here that may bloom.”

In any event, this book presents the techie side of the great “Pessimist-Optimist, Malthusian–Cornucopian” debate that has been with us for decades and will surely continue. Hopefully, the debate can be widened and deepened, with resulting benefits to all of us.

Some of the general problems of belief in unchecked growth are very nicely exposed by Tom Murphy (2012, Exponential Economist Meets Finite Physicist) – highly recommended!

One of my own conclusions is, that exponential decay, such as the aforementioned “carbon law”, makes more sense than the growth case. Overall, however, the assumption that initial large reductions can be achieved with relatively low investment, followed by decreasing reductions at increasing cost is more plausible than the case of exponential growth. Again, this cannot be repeated forever, as cost becomes prohibitive, but this is not really necessary to achieve the goals intended by the “carbon law” proposal.

My own view is that it is good to point out signs of hope and progress (some of my favorites are, e.g., Hans, Ola & Anna Rosling – do read the new book ‘Factfulness’, Max Roser and his co-workers, or Dina D. Pomeranz). And we all hope that innovation can solve at least some of our problems.

However, most people already expect miracles from technology. While innovation may follow exponential growth for some time, this will in all likelihood always change to a different growth model over time¹. The calculations above are only an example.

Scientific limits of the earth system, economic limits (as in the example above), sociological and psychological limits of humans and their societies, as well as the potential for exponential technological growth, need to be viewed together. Ignoring parts of the system will not lead to a solution.

But worse: I see the perceived need for and the creed in endless future technological innovation as a distraction. As misleading. as prolonging our current phase of procrastination and not solving the many problems we can already solve right now.

It is not true that we are currently desperately trying to survive and have no other option than to send our own children into a slavery of food, energy and resource scarcity. It is not true that our only chance is to hope for yet non-existent technologies.

The truth is: We have the technologies, we can solve the energy (see, e.g., Bardi & Sgouridis 2017), food, biodiversity, transportation, equity, etc. problems.

But we are not using the solutions at the necessary scale. We are procrastinating and seeking excuses: whether it is that the problem cannot be solved or that they will solve themselves thanks to a sudden explosion of exponentially growing innovation. We are celebrating ourselves in the media for deploying positive solutions at small scales. At the same time, we are directing the general economy through taxes, tariffs, and subsidies at many orders of magnitude into the opposite, destructive direction.

We are not building a house for our children, we are burning it down. Our greed for money, for personal power and sex, for eating meat and other luxury foods, for playing with ivory tower problems has us care more about ourselves than about the future of our children.

“To ignore evil is to become an accomplice” (Martin Luther King)

Humans are of the Earth, physically adapted to its range of climates, gravity, radiation, electro-magnetic field and composition of the atmosphere. Had there ever been a single critical issue science has conveyed, it is that altering the composition of the Earth’s atmosphere can only bearfatal consequences for nature and humanity.

This scientific projection is holding true: it is estimated that, to date,some 150,000 to 400,000 people world-wide have perished each year due todirect and indirect effects of global warming[i]. This includes, for example, 1833 people in New Orleans, possibly up to 5000 in Puerto Rico, 6329 by typhoon Haiyan in the Philippine―the list goes on.Although these events have been documented in detail, the silence in most of the mainstream media regarding the connection between global warming on the one hand and the rising spate of hurricanes, storms and fires on the other, is deafening.

Figure 1. Average CO2 and Methane: 1800 – 2017. NASA[ii].

Figure 2.Mean global temperature: 1880-2017. NASA[iii].

Atmospheric CO2 levels is rising at a rate of 2 to 3 parts per million per year (Figure 1) while mean global temperature has accelerated between 1998 and 2016, rising by about 0.4 degreesCelsius (Figure 2). The projected trend, inducing large-scale melting of the Greenland, west and east Antarctic ice sheets, many meters-scale sea level rise and a rising spate ofhurricanes, storms, heat waves, fires and droughts, commenced in the 20^th century, threatens  to render large parts of the planet uninhabitable.

Which is what climate science has been projecting over the last 40 years or so[iv]. Themessage,refused by vested interests and ignored or only paid lip service to by the political and economicpowers, has also been overlooked by millions of people due to part cover-up by much of the media. Business as usualand a bread and circuses culture continue unabated. Many understand the climate message but feel powerless, voting for parties that, under false promises, end uptaking little or no effective measures at reduction of carbon emissions.

In so far as there is hope a majority of people will understand global warming is transcending the very life support systems of the planet, it is when they face the rise in extreme weather events. That this to date is not the case is the responsibility of the mainstream media, since,although climate science clearly indicates the rise in carbon emissions is responsible for therise in extreme weather events[v],rarely does themedia include the terms “climate change” or “global warming”in reporting these events only.By contrast, expressions such as “one in 100 or 1000 year event” are common[vi].

Climate science and scientists are rarely represented on media panels, by contrast to science infotainment programs where attractive celebrities promote space travel to the planets and beyond. The promotion by the media of outer space travel and the conquest of planets constitute one of the biggest distractions from the global climate emergency[vii].

Through the media vested interests and their political and journalistic mouthpieces have been proliferating untruths regarding the causes and consequences of global warming. With few exceptions the mainstream media continues to propagate half-truths, or remain silent, or deal mainly with related economic issues, as if anything like the present economy could survive under +4 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial conditions. Whenever the term “future” is expressed in the media and in Parliaments, it is rare that a caveat is made regarding the effects of global warming, given the currently 2 to 3-foldrise in extreme weather events[viii].

With exceptions, little or no information is given in the mainstream media regarding what the future holds under +2 or +4 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial temperatures, projected by the IPCC to take place within this century,which would render large parts of the planet uninhabitable.Likewise, with exceptions, rarely does most of the mainstream media report the global consequences of a nuclear exchange. In the lack of detailed information and warning by the Forth Estate, the world is being led blindly toward collapse[ix].

Andrew Glikson, Earth and paleo-climate scientist

The Trump administration is at it again — this time trying to skirt key environmental analysis that protects our waterways and communities from the threat of the Keystone XL pipeline.

The Trump administration approved the Keystone XL pipeline in early 2017 and thought it was a done deal. We were fighting then and we’re fighting now.

The administration is at it again — this time trying to skirt key environmental analysis that protects our waterways and communities. Thankfully, with people power we can fight back, and we have until June 25th to make sure they don’t get away with this sneaky maneuver  to get this harmful pipeline approved.

Will you stand with us against this dangerous project? Tell the Trump administration that their scheme to push the risky Keystone XL pipeline forward won’t work.

The State Department is taking public comments on this project in an attempt to use a sneaky maneuver to fast track the building of the Keystone XL pipeline. In doing so, they are taking a short cut around the environmental review that we need to protect water, agriculture, wildlife, and the communities that call these places home.

We know that the Keystone XL pipeline is all risk, and no reward. Instead of doing an analysis that would show that this project is too risky to build, they are avoiding anything that would keep them from moving full steam ahead. If tens of thousands of us participate in this official public comment period which ends on June 25, they’ll have no choice but to hear our objections loud and clear on this sneaky maneuver.

Take action to tell the Trump administration that anything short of a full Environmental Impact Statement on the dangerous KXL pipeline won’t be enough. 

Keystone XL would carry 830,000 barrels of the world’s dirtiest oil — tar sands — every day from Alberta, Canada, to the U.S. Gulf Coast. It would be responsible for annual greenhouse gas emissions each year equal to 37.7 million cars — a disaster for our climate. It’s also yet another example of the government trampling on the rights of Indigenous peoples: Keystone XL would cut directly through Sioux treaty lands and near several other tribal reservations and the Ponca Trail of Tears, yet Tribal Nations in Nebraska and South Dakota have not been properly consulted.

This pipeline is bigger than Trump. It’s about the Native Nations whose land and water are threatened, the farmers and ranchers whose land would be taken away to benefit a foreign corporation, and the special places — like the Nebraska Sandhills which are home to threatened wildlife, including whooping cranes, sandhill cranes, and bald eagles — that lie in the path of this dirty pipeline.

Ultimately, this pipeline is about the kind of future we believe in. We need to take action now to build that future that relies on clean, renewable energy instead of locking ourselves into fossil fuel infrastructure for decades to come. People power stopped the Keystone XL pipeline before and we can stop it again.

This fight has never been easy, but we won before because we refused to back down. We are not about to stop now. We can win again. Submit your public comment now.

Onwards,

Kelly Martin is Campaign Director, Beyond Dirty Fuels at Sierra Club

Forces led by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) launched a long-anticipated siege of Yemen’s Red Sea port city of Hodeidah Wednesday, in what is certain to be the bloodiest battle since the Saudis began bombing the impoverished Arab country in March 2015.

The charity group, CARE International, reported 30 airstrikes in the space of a half an hour Wednesday morning, while warships off Yemen’s coast conducted a naval bombardment.

The military operation is being carried out in defiance of warnings from both the United Nations and multiple aid groups that hundreds of thousands of civilians in the crowded city are in danger of losing their lives. They have also warned that the devastation of the port of Hodeidah, which receives an estimated 70-80 percent of Yemen’s imports, including food, fuel and medicine, threatens millions more with starvation in a country where 22.2 million depend on food aid and at least 8.4 million are already facing famine.

Carrying far greater weight than these humanitarian warnings, however, was the approval provided by Washington. Over the past week, a report surfaced that the Trump administration had ordered the Pentagon to review plans for a direct US participation in the siege of Hodeidah. This was followed by a perfunctory statement last week, given anonymously by a spokesperson for the White House National Security Council, that the US opposed any military action “likely to exacerbate the dire humanitarian situation” in Yemen.

On Monday, however, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo issued a statement described as a “blinking yellow light,” i.e., proceed with caution. He allowed that he was “closely following” the situation in Hodeidah but failed to make any appeal to Saudi Arabia or the UAE to refrain from attacking the city. Instead, he declared: “I have spoken with Emirati leaders and made clear our desire to address their security concerns while preserving the free flow of humanitarian aid and life-saving commercial imports.”

And on Wednesday the Wall Street Journal, citing Pentagon sources, reported that the “US military is helping its Gulf allies develop a list of targets,” supposedly with an aim “to minimize the number of civilian casualties.”

Similar claims were made in relation to US targeting in the cities of Mosul, Iraq and Raqqa, Syria, which were reduced to rubble by US bombs and shells, while the number of dead and wounded ran into the tens of thousands.

The siege of Hodeidah, a city of 600,000 people, may well eclipse even those US war crimes.

“A military attack or siege on Hodeidah will impact hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians,” the UN humanitarian coordinator in the country, Lise Grande, warned in a statement on Friday. “In a prolonged worst case, we fear that as many as 250,000 people may lose everything—even their lives.”

The British government of Prime Minister Theresa May, which like the Trump administration and the Obama administration before it, has backed Saudi Arabia and the UAE with massive arms sales, was clearly warned in advance by the UAE of the impending siege, passing on an advisory to British-based aid groups late last week to evacuate the city.

The Red Cross, Care, Doctors Without Borders (MSF) and other groups have pulled their personnel out of the port city, as has the United Nations. These evacuations, together with the bombing and shelling, have brought the distribution of food to Yemen’s starving population to a halt.

More than 13,000 Yemenis have been killed since Saudi Arabia began its bombing campaign over three years ago in a bid to topple the government led by the Houthi rebels and to reinstall the US-backed puppet regime of President Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi.

Hadi, who spends most of his time in the Saudi capital of Riyadh, made a rare trip to the UAE capital of Abu Dhabi Tuesday on the eve of the full-scale attack on Hodeidah.

According to the Middle East Eye website, the UAE strong-armed Hadi into supporting the attack in order to lend the military operation a thin veneer of legitimacy. Hadi had previously condemned the UAE for pursuing its own interests in Yemen, backing southern separatists and seeking to secure for itself Yemeni ports and islands in order to control the strategic Bab al-Mandeb Strait linking the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden, through which most of the maritime trade between Europe and Asia passes.

While UAE troops are on the ground—a number of whom have been killed in the operation—and Saudi planes are providing air support, a force made up of Yemeni mercenaries is led by Tareq Saleh, the nephew of former Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh, who ruled the country for over two decades before being forced out by a mass revolt in 2012. In 2015, the ex-president had allied himself with the Houthis, but two years later shifted his allegiance to the Saudi-led forces, only to be killed by Houthi militiamen last December. There is little doubt that his nephew is now pursuing his own ambitions to take over the country.

A statement was issued in the name of Hadi’s regime declaring, “The liberation of Hodeidah port is the start of the fall of the Houthi militia and will secure marine shipping in Bab al-Mandeb strait and cut off the hands of Iran, which has long-drowned Yemen in weapons that shed precious Yemen blood.”

The statement was clearly aimed at identifying the bloody military operation with US imperialism’s aims in the region. Both the Saudi and Emirati rulers and Washington have claimed that the port of Hodeidah has been used by the Houthis to import arms from Iran, but no evidence has been presented to support this allegation.

From both Riyadh’s and Washington’s perspective, however, the rule of Yemen by any regime that is not a puppet of US and Saudi interests is unacceptable and would weaken the anti-Iranian axis that US imperialism has forged in the region.

Before the siege of Hodeidah began, the International Crisis Group warned that such an operation would be “bloody, prolonged and leave millions of Yemenis without food, fuel and other vital supplies.”

“Any attack on or significant, long-term disruption of operations of the port will have catastrophic consequences for the people of Yemen,” Frank McManus, the International Rescue Committee’s country director in Yemen, told ABC News.

Jolien Veldwijk, the acting country director for CARE International, called the attack “catastrophic, hopeless and devastating.” She warned, “If the port closed, even for a day, then the number of people at risk of famine will increase because no food will come into the country.”

“With this assault, [children] are now suffering more hunger and death,” Anas Shahari, a spokesman for Save the Children, told Reuters. He said that some 300,000 children would lose access to food, water and medicine. Describing the conditions when he visited Hodeidah three months ago, he added, “I could see children who are hungry, children who are on the streets with their ribs sticking out, babies unable to cry because they are so malnourished. That was the situation before, and now it is going to get worse.”

The near-genocidal war against Yemen has been waged since its outset with indispensable aid from Washington, first from the Obama administration, which sold Saudi Arabia and the UAE the warplanes and munitions to slaughter civilians, providing mid-air fueling to their jets to assure round-the-clock bombing and setting up a joint US-Saudi command to render intelligence and logistical support.

Since then, under Trump, special operations troops have been deployed with Saudi forces in the war against Yemen and US support for the war on the Yemeni people has been intensified in the context of the preparation for military confrontation with Iran. President Trump placed this on the agenda through his unilateral May 8 abrogation of the nuclear agreement reached in 2015 between Tehran and the major powers.

While the Trump administration is portraying the US president’s Singapore summit with North Korea’s Kim Jong-un as a de-escalation of global tensions, the predatory face of US imperialism finds its naked expression in Yemen, where the White House and the Pentagon are prepared to sacrifice the lives of millions in pursuit of hegemony against its regional and global rivals.

Originally published by WSWS.org

The rate of sea level rise resulting from the melting of the Antarctic ice sheet has tripled over the past five years, according to new research from a global team of scientists.

The study, published in Nature, finds that ice loss from Antarctica has caused sea levels to rise by 7.6mm from 1992-2017, with two fifths of this increase occurring since 2012.

At a press conference held in London, scientists said the results suggest that Antarctica has become “one of the largest contributors to sea level rise”.

A glaciologist not involved in the paper tells Carbon Brief that the findings show “there now should be no doubt that Antarctica is losing ice due to regional climate change, likely linked to global warming”.

Melting continent

The new research was carried out by a team of scientists from the Ice Sheet Mass Balance Inter-comparison Exercise (IMBIE). The international group was established in 2011 with the aim of creating a comprehensive view of how melting in world’s polar regions could be contributing to sea level rise.

In its last assessment report, released in 2012, it found that ice melt in Antarctica was causing global sea levels to rise by 0.2mm a year. (Over the past two decades, global sea levels have risen around 3.2mm a year in total.)

However, the new analysis finds that Antarctic ice melt is now driving sea level rise of 0.6mm a year – suggesting that the rate of melting has increased three-fold in just five years.

The results show that Antarctic ice melt has become “one of the largest contributors to sea level rise”, says Prof Andrew Shepherd, co-leader of IMBIE and director of the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) Centre for Polar Observation based at the University of Leeds.

Speaking on the sidelines of a press conference held in London, he explains the significance of the new findings to Carbon Brief.

Satellite sentinels

For the new study, the researchers combined data on ice cover and weight taken from a range of satellites, including NASA’s Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) mission and the European Space Agency’s CryoSat mission.

The team then used models to adjust the data to take into account physical processes that might have influenced sea level changes – such as how the ground beneath ice sheets responds to shrinking ice cover.

The resulting data reveals a “clear signal” showing an acceleration in the rate of Antarctic ice sheet melt, says Dr Erik Ivins, co-leader of IMBIE and a senior research scientist at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory. He tells Carbon Brief:

“We now have a signal that is large enough that those adjustments we have to make are smaller than the signal that we’re seeing. So we’re very confident in the net result – which is Antarctica seems to be losing ice mass, enough to cause about 0.6mm of sea level rise per year.”

Breaking ice

To understand why the rate of ice melt has accelerated, the researchers analysed changes to ice cover in all three Antarctic ice sheets.

The diagram below shows their locations: the Antarctic Peninsula (green), West Antarctica (pink) and East Antarctica (blue). The numbers show the location of ice sheet drainage basins.

The chart below shows the total amount of ice loss from Antarctica (purple) and in each region, including West Antarctica (green), East Antarctica (yellow) and the Antarctic Peninsula (red) from 1992-2017. Results from the current study are shown against results from IMBIE’s last assessment in 2012 (dashed lines).

The results show how, in the past decade, West Antarctica has experienced the highest volume of ice loss.

The animation below shows changes in ice sheet thickness across West Antarctica, with red showing reductions in thickness and blue showing gains.

The following chart indicates the extent to which each Antarctic region has contributed to recent sea level rise. It shows that, over the past decade, ice loss from West Antarctica contributed the most to sea level rise.

The reason that West Antarctica may be more vulnerable to melting than other regions is because it is largely made up of  “marine-based” glaciers, which sit on land below sea level.

Where the face of a glacier meets the ocean, warm water can melt it from underneath, gradually forcing back the “grounding line”, which is where the glacier sits on the seabed.

Previous research suggests the global warming could be driving up ocean temperatures and causing changes to ocean currents, which deliver warm water to the sea surface.

Around 75% of the glaciers in West Antarctic ice sheet are marine-based, compared to just 35% of glaciers in East Antarctica, according to the latest assessment report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Icy forecast

Though the study did not seek to make future predictions about how Antarctic melting could influence sea level rise, it does cause “concerns for the future”, Shepherd says:

“The three-fold increase puts Antarctica now in the frame as one of the largest contributors to sea level rise. The recent acceleration makes us have concerns about the future.”

In the video below, Ivins explains that Antarctic melting could become a far larger driver of sea level rise than melting from Greenland – which was once thought to be the biggest driver of global sea level rise.

The findings are “significant” because they encompass “new satellite missions and advances in geophysical techniques and corrections”, says Dr Alison Banwell, a glaciologist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center Group (NSIDC) at the University of Colorado, Boulder, who was not involved in the research. She tells Carbon Brief:

“There now should be no doubt that Antarctica is losing ice due to regional climate change, likely linked to global warming. If these rates of sea level rise continue, they will put low-lying cities like London and New York at severe risk of increased flooding.”

The research is part of a special issue in Nature, which includes five papers exploring Antarctica’s past, present and possible futures.

The United States went ahead on Friday with the imposition of 25 percent tariffs on $50 billion worth of Chinese goods, with the threat of additional tariffs in the future. The decision by the Trump Administration to launch a trade war between the world’s two largest economies will contribute to the already growing tensions and danger of military conflict in the Asia-Pacific region.

The first set of tariffs worth $34 billion will take effect on July 6 while the additional $16 billion of tariffs will be applied at a later date. President Trump claimed that these measures would “serve as an initial step toward bringing balance to the trade relationship between the United States and China” while couching it in phony terms of protecting American jobs. The sectors targeted include aerospace, robotics, manufacturing, and the auto industries.

The United States has “now launched a trade war,” China’s Commerce Ministry responded, saying it would immediately implement “countermeasures of the same scale and strength.” The ministry further stated that all previous trade talks would be invalid. Beijing then announced $50 billion worth of tariffs on US products on agriculture, automobiles, and seafood, among others, and similarly split into $34 and $16 billion installments.

Washington has already pledged to impose additional tariffs on Chinese products if Beijing retaliates while blaming China for supposedly conducting unfair trade practices and stealing intellectual property for years.

Trump’s trade war measures against China were praised by leading Democrats, who had previously criticized his decision to impose steel and aluminum tariffs of up to 25 percent on US allies. “The president’s actions on China are on the money,” said Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer. “China is our real trade enemy, and their theft of intellectual property and their refusal to let our companies compete fairly threatens millions of future American jobs.”

Such statements make clear that trade war, far from being the mere product of President Donald Trump’s personal proclivities, is being embraced as a legitimate policy tool by both parties, arising from the deepening crisis of the international capitalist world order.

A US-China trade war would not only affect the two countries, but others in the region, including US allies. South Korea’s Finance Minister Kim Dong-yeon attempted to downplay the effect a trade war would have on the economy, but said “[W]e are not ruling out the possibility of the recent anxiety in the market, mixed with trade conflicts among major countries and rising international crude prices, affecting [the Korean market].”

Washington’s latest trade war measures come amid a series of provocative military escalations aimed at China. This includes stepped-up US “freedom of navigation” maneuvers in the South China Sea, sending US naval vessels through waters claimed by China, and sales of arms to governments with longstanding conflicts with Beijing.

To this end, as the WSWS warned, the goal of the recent summit between Trump and Kim Jong-un was not to reduce the risk of war in the region, but to force Pyongyang to choose between falling in behind Washington or face complete destruction.

And while the US media attacked Trump for allowing China to emerge as the “winner” from that summit, there is clearly a fear in Beijing that it will lose influence over North Korea. Park Won-gon, a security expert at South Korea’s Handong Global University, stated recently, “China may think that reconciliation between the U.S. and North Korea could lead to a reduction in its influence over the Korean Peninsula and undermine its leverage to keep America in check in the regional geopolitical context.”

On Tuesday, the same day Trump as meeting with Kim, the American Institute in Taiwan (AIT), opened its new building in Taipei, holding a ceremony with senior US diplomats as well as Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen.

The AIT serves as Washington’s embassy in Taiwan as the two governments do not have official diplomatic ties. The “One China Policy” to which both Beijing and Taipei adhere, states that Taiwan is a part of China, but both sides agree to disagree over which government is the legitimate head of the whole country.

As countries cannot have formal ties with both Beijing and Taipei, which would mean “two Chinas,” most recognize Beijing, including the US. However, Washington continues to provide massive amounts of military hardware to Taipei, angering Beijing, which has stated that a Taiwanese move to declare formal independence would instigate a war between the two.

At the AIT building’s opening ceremony, Assistant US Secretary of State for Educational and Cultural Affairs Marie Royce, stated, “AIT’s new home is both a tangible symbol that reflects the strength of our ties, and a state-of-the-art facility that will make possible even greater cooperation for years to come.”

China’s Foreign Ministry spokesman Geng Shuang responded by stating, “The United States sending officials to Taiwan under any excuse is in serious violation of the ‘one China’ principle. It interferes with China’s internal affairs and negatively impacts China-US relations.”

Cross-strait tensions have grown in recent months, in no small part due to the Trump administration’s actions. In April, Trump signed a travel act to allow more US officials to visit Taiwan while also granting American firms a license to sell submarine technology to Taipei. Both moves generated anger in Beijing, which responded by conducting the first live-fire naval drills in the Taiwan Strait since 2015.

Under the doctrine of ‘strategic competition’ adopted by the Pentagon late last year, the United States military made clear that it sees trade war and military struggle as being on a continuum of perpetual conflict between the United States and its international competitors. Amid the acrimonious breakdown of talks at the G7 last weekend, all international relations have been thrown into disarray, opening up a new, and extremely dangerous, period of international tension and conflict.

Originally published in WSWS.org

Over the next 50/150 years our Biosphere will undergo drastic temperature change. That change may bring about our extinction. Unlike past extinctions, this one will not be brought on by a random meteorite/asteroid or natural planetary happening. It will be self-inflicted by Homo sapiens.

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Over the next 50/150 years our Biosphere will undergo drastic temperature change. That change may bring about our extinction. Unlike past extinctions, this one will not be brought on by a random meteorite/asteroid or natural planetary happening. It will be self-inflicted by Homo sapiens. How could this be happening? The evidence is clear. As we spread throughout the planet, we destroyed all life and nonlife in our path. Then from the Industrial Revolution onward, without discretion we pillaged the planet’s natural resources, and in doing so burning enormous amounts of coal, oil and gas. At the same time deforestation limited the amount of CO2 being absorbed back. The result: carbon dioxide levels in the biosphere are now beyond what they were millions of years ago, well before our evolutionary beginnings. Rising global temperatures have been the result. And they will continue to rise as the scenario gets worse. Far more damaging than CO2, Methane (CH4) is now beginning to bubble in the warming Arctic. It will increase global warming exponentially. We were warned in 2012 by the World Bank that with CH4, a deadly Permian Triassic Feedback Loop could occur. This raises serious epistemological questions: Why are so many of us so blinded to all of this reality? Could it be that we have a self-destructive suicidal neurotic/psychotic cranial imperfection? And if that is the reason, how deeply implanted is it in our DNA eukaryotic chromosomic brains? Even more disturbing is this question: Clearly our aggression and disregard for Nature was an evolutionary strength from the beginning of our hominid development. Why is it now a weakness? Now to the bigger question: If a weakness, do we psychologically neurologically have the ability to overcome it; to alter what had once been our strength and replace it with a new form of non aggressive synchronous behavior that establishes for Homo sapiens coexistent unity in inter active equilibrium with all life and nonlife on the planet? And then the big question: If not, what then?

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The term “Biosphere” defines the relatively thin layer of the planet’s air and water that can support life. It envelops the planet, extending down to the deepest layers of soils and ocean trenches and up to the highest oxygenated level. Metaphorically speaking, if you took a soccer ball and painted it with a thick coat of varnish, the depth of that coat would be in the same proportion to the ball as is the biosphere depth to Planet Earth.

For humans the habitable fraction begins at sea level and extends upward a few thousand feet above sea level. Humans are born and live out their lives in their narrow fraction. Other forms of life also exist in the biosphere from top to bottom; squirrels, bears, cockroaches, sharks, Antarctic sea spiders, Plankton, and the list goes on.

Predecessors to cellular life, Prokaryotic bonds, began to form in the Biosphere several billion years ago. Predecessors to Homo sapiens began to form four million years ago. (Laetoli footprints proved that hominids walked upright as far back as 3.6 million years) We in our present form as measured by increased brain cage size began our journey about four hundred thousand years ago.

We know that all “life” forms are in a sense at one with the biosphere. Each lives in a state of complete biological niche interdependency. We are no different. We live in a state of total dependency on our niche.

Also we are the same as all other life in our need to adjust as change occurs in our niche. Adjustment generally occurs by way of adaptation to changes in the surrounding environment. It normally takes place in multiples of many hundreds or thousands or even millions of years. Adjustment can however come quickly. Darwin’s Galapagos bird beaks adapted relatively quickly as the nut shells became harder. (Discovered by meticulous 20 year study beginning in in 1970) We also know that adaptability is not always possible. Then a species will die out.

We also know that biosphere change can come quickly. The Permian Triassic mass extinction 252 million years ago and the Cretaceous extinction 66 million years ago are two examples of rapid biosphere change. The Cretaceous came from a meteorite and resulted in low biosphere temperatures and the Permian Triassic came from high temperatures. Both were accompanied by atmospheric change so sudden and temperature extremes so sudden as to extinguish in a relatively short period of time a very large percentage of planetary life. When such rapid biosphere change does occur, those species that inhabit precisely bounded biological niches are the first to be affected. They die out quickly. Then others follow.

This brings us to the question of our age. Are we now facing the possibility of another sudden biosphere change? (This one of our own making) And if we are, why are we not concerned? There is ample evidence at hand that we are about to face a change. For one, there is a continuing die out of other planetary life. Much of that die out has been of our own doing. It began early on with our population expansion. As we spread throughout the planet, we destroyed every other form of life in our path. That die out is now accelerating on land and in the oceans.

Another noticeable indicator that could affect our continued existence is more recent. It is seen in the biosphere change coming from the excessive amounts of coal, oil and gas burned since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. As a result, enormous amounts of CO2 have been added to the earth’s biosphere. At the same time deforestation is limiting the amount of CO2 being absorbed back. Rising global temperatures are the result.

This has been well known in the scientific community for some time. Back in 2012, the World Bank warned that resultant high temperatures from CO2 could trigger what is called a Methane Hydrate Feedback Loop in the Arctic. Scientists there are now telling us that this has already begun. Recent temperatures have been the highest in recorded history.

So here is the question. Are we about to face a test of our biosphere vulnerability?

Sources

Craig Dilworth

Uppsala University, Sweden

Craig Dilworth, Too Smart For Our Own Good. The Ecological Predicament of Humankind. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010.

“Due to the power/interest structures of global capitalism and the juggernaut-like momentum of the global economy, it is most unlikely that any of the radical changes to society and the economy proposed by environmentalists‑especially changes in philosophies and worldviews, will be adopted in time. Consequently human civilization‑primarily Western techno-industrial urban society, will self-destruct, producing massive environmental damage, social chaos and mega death. We are entering a new age, with great dieback. The only question that remains is whether we will survive this dark age, and if so, how much longer.”

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Earth Will Survive. We May Not.

By Adam Frank

Dr. Frank is a professor of astrophysics at the University of Rochester

“What Earth’s history does make clear, however, is that if we don’t take the right kind of action soon the biosphere will simply move on without us, creating new versions of itself in the changing climate we’re generating now. So we must be honest. The problem is not saving the Earth or life writ large, but saving our cherished civilization. From that perspective the nature of our choices changes significantly.”

CLICK HERE FOR ADAM FRANK LINK

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Seas Surge as Pace of Antarctica Ice Loss Triples in 5 Yrs: 3 Trillion Tons Melted

AFP 06/14/2018

“Paris (AFP) – Antarctica has lost a staggering three trillion tonnes of ice since 1992, according to a landmark study published Wednesday that suggests the frozen continent could redraw Earth’s coastlines if global warming continues unchecked. Two-fifths of that ice loss occurred in the last five years, a three-fold increase in the pace at which Antarctica is shedding its kilometres thick casing, a consortium of 84 scientists reported in the journal Nature.”

CLICK HERE FOR JUAN COLE LINK

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Antarctica Is Melting More Than Twice as Fast as in 2012

By KENDRA PIERRE-LOUIS

“The continent’s rate of ice loss is speeding up, which is contributing even more to rising sea levels.”

CLICK HERE FOR KRNDRA PIERRE-LOUIS LINK

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Arctic methane emissions

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

“In 2008 the United States Department of Energy National Laboratory system[14] identified potential clathrate destabilization in the Arctic as one of the most serious scenarios for abrupt climate change, which have been singled out for priority research. The US Climate Change Science Program released a report in late December 2008 estimating the gravity of the risk of clathrate destabilization, alongside three other credible abrupt climate change scenarios”

CLICK HERE FOR WIKIPEDIA LINK

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Pope Tells Oil Executives to Act on Climate: ‘There Is No Time to Lose, June 9, 2018, NY Times

Click Below For Link

Pope Article NY Times

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

He has written three books. A fourth is near completion. It is about a necessary geo political, social, religious, economic paradigm shift for human survival.

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

Co-Written by Sandeep Pandey and Bobby Ramakant

(Written on the occasion of India Pakistan Friendship and Peace March, 19 to 30 June, 2018, Ahmedabad to Nada Bet)

After a hiatus in the movement for global nuclear disarmament it is heartening to note that there are some positive developments over the last couple of years. The United Nations General Assembly passed a resolution for ‘taking forward multilateral nuclear disarmament negotiations’ on 23 December, 2016 which culminated in the adoption of ‘Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons’ on 7 July, 2017, with 122 countries voting in its favour, only one voting against it and 70 not participating. International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) was awarded the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize ‘for its work to draw attention to the catastrophic human consequences of any use of nuclear weapons and for its ground-breaking efforts to achieve a treaty-based prohibition of such weapons.’ And more recently, on 12 June, 2018, United States and Democratic People’s Republic of Korea have agreed for denuclearization of Korean Peninsula in peace talks held at Singapore.

It is noteworthy that the very first resolution of General Assembly of UN adopted on 24 January, 1946 called for elimination of nuclear weapons. Since then a number of resolutions have been passed. However, there has hardly been any movement in that direction. Number of nuclear weapons and number of countries possessing them have gone up. The dishonesty of the big five – all members of Security Council, US, United Kingdom, Russia, France and China, officially described as the Nuclear Weapon States – in continuing to hold on to the weapons while trying to ensure that no other nation produces these weapons through imposition of Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons and Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty has made a mockery of the exercise of global nuclear disarmament. 191 States have joined NPT, the largest number to have done so in any arms limitation or disarmament agreement, which includes the five nuclear weapon States. India, Pakistan and Israel have kept out of these treaties with all three having ‘illegally’ acquired the nuclear weapons. India did not go along with CTBT as it thought that the treat failed to include a commitment by nuclear weapon States to eliminate their nuclear weapons within a time-bound framework. US and China have not even ratified CTBT. North Korea had acceded to NPT in 1985 but came out of it in 2003 following testing of its nuclear weapons.

In 1988 the Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi put forward a comprehensive proposal for global nuclear disarmament which till date remains the only such initiative by a head of any government at the UN. He described these weapons as immoral and abhorrent as they don’t distinguish between combatant and non-combatant, criticized them for making international politics undemocratic and thought that these inexcusably expensive weapons divert planet’s precious resources away from most pressing needs of human beings. He castigated the much touted principle of nuclear deterrence as the ‘ultimate expression of the philosophy of terrorism, holding humanity hostage to the presumed security needs of a few.’ However, when Rajiv Gandhi saw that the nuclear weapon States were not serious about the goal of global nuclear disarmament he gave up what was the last serious effort by India to pursue the objective of nuclear weapons free world. Ten years after this famous speech at UN, India tested its weapon at Pokaran. Quite predictably India has not voted for the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.

Two Strategic Arms Limitation Talks took place between US and Soviet Union in 1969 and 1979, which led to another two Strategic Arms Reduction Treaties in 1991 and 1993, proposing limits on number of nuclear weapons which each side could possess. In spite of all these well intentioned efforts the world today has a combined stockpile of over twenty thousand nuclear warheads, enough to wipe out all human population from the face of earth. Ironically, these weapons exist for human security.

The Treaty on Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons believes that the only way to guarantee that nuclear weapons are never used again under any circumstances is to completely eliminate them. It raises concerns about disproportionate impact of nuclear weapons on health of women and girls due to ionizing radiation. It considers suffering and harm caused to victims, such as Hibakusha, the Japanese survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki tragedies, as unacceptable. Significantly, it also raises concerns about impact of nuclear weapons activities on indigenous population. Most Uranium, the raw material found in nature for making nuclear weapons, mining sites are located in habitats of tribals or aborigines. The Treaty considers production, maintenance and modernization of nuclear weapons as waste of economic and human resources. It says nuclear weapons pose risk to all humanity because of possibility of detonation by accident, miscalculation or design. The Treaty highlights the need for a legally binding prohibition of nuclear weapons which includes irreversible, verifiable and transparent elimination of nuclear weapons. It believes nuclear weapons to be abhorrent to principles of humanity and dictates of public conscience.

Treaty on Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons prevents its party States to develop, test, produce, manufacture, otherwise acquire, possess or stockpile nuclear weapons or other nuclear explosive devices. It also precludes the possibility of stationing, installation or deployment of nuclear weapons in any party State’s territory.

Article 6 of the Treaty holds States responsible for providing medical care, rehabilitation, psychological support, social and economic inclusion for any victims of use or testing of nuclear weapons. This shows that the Treaty is comprehensive and sensitive to all aspects of nuclear weapons programme.

So far 59 States have signed this Treaty and 10 have ratified it. In order to come into effect ratification by at least 50 countries is required. One hopes that countries which have not signed or ratified it will come forward sooner than later to see it through and take it to its logical conclusion, making this world free of nuclear weapons.

Sandeep Pandey Visiting Professor, Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad

Bobby Ramakant is the Director (Policy) at CNS (Citizen News Service) and recipient of the WHO Director General’s WNTD Award 2008. Follow him on Twitter @bobbyramakant or visit: www.citizen-news.org

e-mail: ashaashram@yahoo.com and bobbyramakant@yahoo.com

The US has broken promises and treaties in every corner of the globe.  The US ignores the UN Charter, which is a treaty. It flouts international law, which is based on treaties.  The US habitually starts asymmetrical wars, which is aggression and the worst of all war crimes.  It destroys nations, leaving millions of people dead, dying, and in misery.

Libya was once a prosperous nation.  Muammar Gaddafi was an eccentric dictator, but he had a love for Libya and its people.  Under Gaddafi the people enjoyed a high standard of living, economic freedom, and gender equality.  Education and medical care were free.  Having a home and food was considered a human right.  Libya’s oil wealth benefited the people.

Gaddafi was attacked and vilified by the US for decades.  After the attacks on the US of September 11, 2001 Gaddafi cooperated with the US in the War on Terror.  That is not to say that the War on Terror was a good thing, but Gaddafi was being US friendly.  In further efforts to establish friendly relations with the US, Gaddafi denuclearized in 2003.  President George W. Bush praised Libya for denuclearizing and suggested Libya as a model for North Korea.  In 2011 President Obama wantonly destroyed Libya and conspired in Gaddafi’s assassination.  Obama’s Secretary of State gloated afterwards “we came, we saw, he died…ha,ha,ha”.

Even if North Korea completely and forever denuclearizes Kim Jong-un can never be assured that one day the US won’t try to do the same thing to North Korea that it did to Libya.  North Korea can never put its trust in the US, because the US has proved itself untrustworthy over and over again.

Iraq did not have a nuclear weapons program since the early 1990’s.  After the First Gulf War in 1991, Saddam Hussein cooperated with the United Nations and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspectors right up until the US invasion in 2003.  The weapons inspectors advised against the invasion and recommended that the inspections be continued.  President George W. Bush invaded anyway based on known lies that Saddam Hussein hada nuclear weapons program.  After the invasion and destruction of Iraq, 1625 weapons inspectors spent the next 2 years searching Iraq and found no weapons of mass destruction.

The US continues to accuse Iran of having a nuclear weapons program even though the IAEA certifies that it doesn’t, and all 16 US intelligence agencies have said that Iran has not had an activenuclear weapons program since 2003.  Facts do not matter to the US.  It creates its own reality.  Based on its own unreality, the US can invent any reason it wants to impose sanctions and invade asymmetrical countries.

Iraq denuclearized, Libya denuclearized and Iran denuclearized.  The US invaded Iraq based on the unreality of the existence of nuclear weapons.  Libya was invaded based on the invented unreality that the invasion was for human rights.  The US has imposed sanctions on Venezuela because it does not consider it “democratic enough”.  The US has imposed sanction against Russia because of its alleged invasion of Ukraine, after a US instigated putsch.

If North Korea completely denuclearizes and the US removes all economic sanctions, there is no way to guarantee that some future US president won’t accuse North Korea of secretly harboring a nuclear program.  Or the US can invent a false flag event or use a “red-herring” to impose economic sanctions.  A red-herring is an issue that distracts from the real issue.

Economic sanctions are financial weapons of mass destruction that killhundreds of thousands of people.  The US can always find a red-herring excusefor imposing sanctions, as it has with Venezuela.With Venezuela the real issue is not democracy.  Venezuela has regular elections, while the USA backs manydictators and absolute monarchs all over the world.  The real issue is that Venezuela nationalized its oil wealth to benefit its own people, costing Exxon and other US oil corporations billions of dollars in profits.

Human rights in North Korea is a red-herring, which the US propaganda mills keep grinding out.  North Korean defectors are paid a reward up to $860,000 depending on their intelligence and propaganda value.  Tales of North Korean human rights abuses are not based on facts, but arerumors based on rumors and propaganda.The US does not care about human rights.  The only thing the US foreign policy cares about is its empire and taking care of US corporate interests around the world.  Otherwise the US would do something about Saudi Arabia’s human rights abuses.

Saudi Arabia is an absolute monarchy and the most brutal regime in the world.  The US is an accomplice to Saudi Arabia’sgenocidal bombing and blockade of Yemen, which is starvingmillions of civilians.  Saudi Arabia beheads or crucifies over 100 prisoners every year.  One never hears a peep out of the US State Department about human rights in Saudi Arabia.

The US never squawks about human rights inColumbia, Egypt, Honduras, Israel, Rwanda, Turkey,Ukraine, or its ownatrocious human rights record.  The US has5% of the world’s population and 25% of the world’s prisoners; yet it constantly harps about North Korea allegedly having a “gulag of 200,000 political prisoners”.

The US has made a political issue of the tragic death of Otto Warmbier, yet the Hamilton County, Ohio coroner report says it found no evidence that he was tortured while a prisoner in North Korea.  The US is using his death for propaganda, and not because it cares about an individual life.

The US has killed millions of civilians in its illegal wars of aggression, bombed thousands of hospitals, schools and civilian infrastructures over the past 70 years.  The US has black sites where it tortures victims that it has abducted and imprisoned secretly and illegally.  The US Senate Select Committee on IntelligenceTorture Report is evidence that the US has tortured to death prisoners in black sites and at Guantanamo Bay detention camp.

Between 1948 and 1987 South Korea was ruled by US puppet dictators, such as Syngman Rhee and Park Chung-Hee.  They killed, tortured, and imprisoned without trial hundreds of thousands of South Koreans they considered dissidents.  South Korea still enforces it repressive National Security Act, which is a violation of human rights.  The law criminalizes political views it considers unpatriotic.  Peace activists risk being thrown in prison.  It is a crime in South Korea toassociate with anyone even suspected of being a communist or sympathetic to North Korea.  South Korea has thousands of political prisoners under the National Security Act.

North Korea’s missiles are another red herring issue.  It is not against international law for a country to have missiles, even intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBM).  Every country has the right to have missiles for self-defense, launch satellites and explore outer space.  Actually it is not against any international law for a country who is not a signatory of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty to have nuclear weapons.  North Korea withdrew from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty in 2003, which it had every legal right to do.

North Korea has missiles and nuclear weapons because the US has been threatening it with invasion and nuclear weapons since 1953.  North Korea is a poor country, and it is economically less costly for self-defense to have nuclear weapons and missiles thanto maintaining a modern air force and keep up the conventional arms race with South Korea.

The threat of war in Korea has its roots in Washington and not in Pyongyang.  It is the USA that is the aggressor.The US is a savagely violent and aggressive nation with the ambition ofan empire that rules the world.  It demands that other nations submit to its will.  The US does not hesitate to use overwhelming violence against small nations to enforce its hegemony.  It will punish them until they submit or until they are so utterly destroyed that they are an example to other countries that even think aboutdisobeying US dictates.  During the Korean War the US killed 3 million Koreans.  The US killed another 5 million South East Asians during the Vietnam War.  Millions have been killed in the War on Terror.  Civilians are the main victims.

The power of the US is so enormous that if it were not so tragic it would be laughable when the US claims that it is being threatened by North Korea.  North Korea is a nation of 25 million peasants, with a Gross Domestic Product of approximately $20 billion, and a military budget of $6 billion.  It is not a threat to the national security of the US, with its high-tech military and a budget that exceeds $1 trillion dollars per year.

A war with the U.S. would be madness.  Kim Jong-un and his government are not insane, but the many US war mongers and war criminals such as John Bolton are.  The US has a long history of war madness, most recently in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, and Ukraine.

It is nuclear madness for the US to move NATO to Russia’s border.  In the USinstigated putsch in Ukraine, the Obama administration admitted that it was willing to risk a nuclear war with Russia.  The Pentagon insanely plans for limited nuclear wars and winnable nuclear wars.  The US has an insane first strike policy, which means that other nuclear powered adversaries have to keep their nuclear arsenal on a hair-trigger alert.  The risks of a nuclear accident are enormous.  The US has pushed the doomsday clock to 2 minutes until Armageddon.

North Korea is not paranoidto fear the US and prepare its defenses accordingly.  North Korea is well aware of the US’s use of total warfare against its adversaries.  Total warfare means that nobody including the enemy’s civilian population is off limits, and that nothing, including civilian infrastructure is exempt from destruction.  Total warfare also means that international laws, treaties and the norms of civilized warfare do not restrain the US.  North Korea was a victim of US total warfare in the 1950’s.  It wants to avoid a repeat of that war by havinga credibledeterrent for self-defense.

Most Americans are unaware of the war crimes that the US committed during the Korean War, but almost every Korean knows, in both the North and the South.  On rare occasions a mainstream media outlet such as The Washington Post will have an article such as “The U.S. War Crime North Korea won’t Forget”.  More often the alternative media is the best source of historical truth.  Jay Jason has written an excellent article on US war crimes:  “Negotiations? Third World Nations be Aware! Americans Napalmed and Bombed Out All 38 North Korean Cities!”.

The US bombed Korea with 635,000 tons of high explosive.  The US perfected napalm during the Korean War and dropped 32,500 tons of it on Korea.  When the US eventually ran out of targets it bombed North Korea’s irrigation dams,which flooded croplands causing mass starvation of civilians.

The US used germ warfare against North Korea and China.  The U.S. dropped insect and animal vectors with black plague, smallpox, cholera, encephalitis, anthrax and other deadly diseases.  Dave Chaddock wrote an excellently researched book on the subject:  “This Must Be the Place:  How the U.S. Waged Germ Warfare in the Korean War and Denied It Ever Since”.  David Swanson interviewed Dave Chaddock on Talk Nation Radio.  Jeff Brown, author of “China Rising, Capitalist Roads, Socialist Destination” has created an online library for researchers of US biological warfare:  Bioweapon Truth Commission Global Online Library.

The definitive work proving that the US used germ warfare in Korea is the 1999 book by Stephen Endicott and Edward Hagerman:  “The United States and Biological Warfare, Secrets of the Early Cold War and Korea”.It was the captured pilots’ confessions of participating in germ warfare that led the CIA to come up with the ludicrous fiction of U.S. prisoners being brainwashed.  Brainwashing is a myth, but it was popularized by US propaganda and the Hollywood film “The Manchurian Candidate” in order to cover up US germ warfare.

Some in the CIA must not have gotten the memorandum that brainwashing was a fiction.  From 1953 to 1973 the CIA launched a secret human experiment program on mind control, named MK-Ultra.  Some of the experimental participants volunteered, and others where experimented on without their permission.  The CIA used everything from torture, electric shock treatment and drugs to try and reproduce the alleged brainwashing of Korean War prisoners.  It never succeeded, and often the results were tragic.  CIA scientist Frank Olson fell or was pushedfrom a New York hotel window after he unknowingly took LSD in a CIA experiment.

The mainstream propaganda media keeps screaming that North Korea cannot be trusted to keep its word.  Yet it was the US that violated the 1953 Korean War armistice agreement by nuclearizing the Korean peninsula.  In 1957 President Dwight D. Eisenhower equipped US forces in Korea with“dual capability (nuclear) weapons, such as the Honest John and the 280 mm. cannon“, in violation of section 13 (d).  The US had at least 950 nuclear weapons in South Korea until President George H. W. Bush said that he withdrew them in 1991. The US still has plenty of nuclear weapons in the airand on the sea that it constantly uses to threaten North Korea.

During the Korean War General Douglas MacArthur wanted to use 30 nukes on North Korea and China.  President Truman fired him, but not because MacArthur wanted to use nukes.  Truman wanted a “responsible” general in charge of nuking North Korea and China.  Truman preauthorized MacArthur’s replacement, General Matthew Ridgeway, to use nuclear bombs at his discretion.  Ridgeway avoided World War Three by not using them, although Truman had sent him nuclear bombs to Okinawa for that purpose.

It was Truman that used atomic bombs on Japan for the sole reason of demonstrating US power to Joseph Stalin.  Truman divided Korea in 1945 so that the US could establish a colony in the South.  Trumanintervened in the Korean Civil War before the United Nations authorized it, and he publicly threatened to use the atomic bomb in the Korean War.  Truman started the Cold War with his 1947 Truman Doctrine, which would later nearly result in the destruction of the planet in a nuclear holocaust.

Fast forward to the 1990’s.  The Soviet Union collapses and there is a pause in the Cold War.  North Korea has lost Russia as its most important sources of foreign aid and one of its major markets for exports.  Between 1994 and 1998 North Korea is hit with a series of draughts and floods.  The combinations of crop failures and the loss of Russian aid created famines and starvation in North Korea.  The US propaganda accuses North Korea of starving its people “in order to stay in power”, while the US is imposing economic sanctions that causes more starvation.  US intelligence agencies predicted that North Korea would soon collapse because of the sanctions.  But the US had an immediate concern with North Korea’s nuclear program.

The Clinton administration had a very tense confrontation with North Korea in 1994 over North Korea’s nuclear program, much like the “fire and fury” of 2017.  The US accused North Korea of working on nuclear weapons.  North Korea has to import almost all of its oil and claimed that it was developing nuclear power for electricity.  North Korea has a legal right to nuclear reactors just as Japan, South Korea and every other country have.  War was averted when North Korea and the Clinton administration negotiated an agreement called the Agreed Framework.

Under the Agreed Framework North Korea agreed not to withdraw from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, open itself to extensive IAEA inspection and to freeze its nuclear program.  In return the Clinton administration promised to compensate North Korea with the delivery of oil for electric generation and the construction of two light water nuclear reactors, which produce electricity but not weapons grade plutonium.  The US also agreed to the suspension of military exercises, and the normalization of diplomatic relations.If the Agreed Framework sounds familiar, it should.  It is now where we are heading after the Kim Jong-un and Trump summit in Singapore.

What went wrong with the Agreed Framework?  First, Clinton came under heavy criticism by Republicans and hardliners.  They accused him of appeasement and caving in to blackmail.  Clinton responded that the US would never have to deliver on its promises, because North Korea was on the verge of an economic disintegration of its regime.  The US dragged its feet on the delivery of oil to North Korea and delayed the construction of the promised light water reactors.

Second, the US Congress refused to fund the US obligations under the Agreed Framework.  Congress also refused to lift the economic sanctions against North Korea.  North Korea responded that it would withdraw from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and resume its nuclear program if the US did not fulfill its obligation.  Clinton could not keep his promise even if he wanted to, just as Trump may not be able to keep any of his promises to North Korea.

The final breakdown of the Agreed Framework came in 2002 when President George W. Bush declared that North Korea was an Axis of Evil.  He accused North Korea of secretly working on a nuclear bomb in violation of the Agreed Framework and stopped the delivery of oil and the construction of the two light water nuclear reactors.  In response North Korea withdrew from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and began working on its nuclear program, which it had every right to do under international law.

Conclusion

The US has been threatening the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea with nuclear weapons, conventional weapons and financial weapons of mass destruction since 1953.  It is a violation of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty for a nuclear power country to threaten a non-nuclear power country.   North Korea had a legal right to withdraw from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty because of US threats.  North Koreadeveloped nuclear weapons and ICBM’s for self-defense against the US and its colony South Korea.  North Korea is not in violation of international law by having nuclear weapons and missiles.

The US has threatened North Korea with “fire and furry” if it does not denuclearize.  To avoid an attack by the US, North Korea offered to negotiate its denuclearization in return for promises by the US of non-aggression.

North Korea can never trust promises of the US. What one president agrees to another can take away, just as Trump violated Obama’s Iran Nuclear Deal and Bush reneged on the Agreed Framework of 1994. Trump also reversed Obama’s opening with Cuba.

The US has a long history of breaking treaties and violating international law. The US invaded Afghanistan with flimsy evidence that Afghanistan was harboring terrorists that were responsible for the attacks on the US of September 11, 2001.

Afghanistan had agreed to cooperate with the US if the US would provide it with evidence that Osama bin Laden was responsible for 9-11. The US refused and invaded Afghanistan anyway.

The US invaded Iraq based on known lies that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, when he did not. The U.S. has committed military aggression against at least 23 countries in the past 30 years.

The US abused the UN authorized mission of the “right to protect” civilians in Libya. Libya had a high standard of development until the US and its coalition destroyed the country and caused the assassination of its leader Muammar Gaddafi.

The US then purloined Libya’s arsenal of weapons and shipped them by a CIA rat line to Syria to overthrow the legal government of Bashar al-Assad. The US covertly backed terrorists in Syria in 2011 and is responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Syrians. The US now is openly invading Syria and flouts the UN Charter and international law.

The US has declared that Venezuela is a threat to thenational security of the US. It is such a ridiculous charge that Obama could not keep a straight face when he made the declaration in 2015. Obama mumbled that his true motivation was that Venezuela was not “democratic enough”.

The real reason for US sanctions against Venezuela is that it is a socialist country that nationalized its oil for the benefit of the Venezuelan people. The US was caught red handed in a 2002 failed coup d’etat against the democratically elected Hugo Chavez. The coup failed because the people of Venezuela rose up against the coup plotters.  The US is now openly calling for another militarycoup in Venezuela and is funding anti-democratic opposition groups.

General Wesley Clark has publicly stated that a high ranking officer in the Pentagon told him shortly after 9-11 that the US planned to “take out seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq, and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and, finishing off, Iran”.

After 17 years the US has not changed its plans. Once a country gets on the US list to “take-out” it can never get off; the US is relentless even if it takes years or decades.

Countries that nationalize their natural resources or keep out US capital are on the list for regime change. Russia, Venezuela, Cuba, Syria, Iran and North Korea are at the top of the list.

In his 2002 “Axis of Evil” speech George W. Bush put North Korea 8^th on the list that General Wesley Clark spoke about. The US is just biding its time. First it plans to take-out Iran. Then it will try to “finish off” with the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.

*

[This article was first published at The Greanville Post.  Itis the original work of David William Pear.  There is no copyright, and it is available free to any publication in the world that wants to publish it in any language.  Editing is permitted for spelling errors, grammatical errors, to fit the space of the publication or any other purpose except to change the intended meaning of the article.  You may change the title.  You may use the suggested graphics, your own or none.  Please share and distribute widely.  Thank you. My contact email is dwpear521@gmail.com].

David William Pear is a progressive columnist writing on economic, political and social issues. His articles have been published by OpEdNews, The Greanville Post, The Real News Network, Truth Out, Consortium News, Global Research, and many other publications.   David is active in social issues relating to peace, race relations and religious freedom, homelessness and equal justice. David is a member of Veterans for Peace, Saint Pete for Peace, CodePink, and International Solidarity Movement.

In 2017 David spent 3 weeks in South Korea researching the Korean War of 1950 to 1953.  In 2016 David spent 10 weeks in Palestine with the Palestinian lead non-violent resistance group International Solidarity Movement. In February of 2015 he was part of a people-to-people delegation to Cuba with CodePink. In November of 2015 he was a delegate with CodePink to Palestine to show solidarity with Palestinians. David frequently makes people-to-people trips to Russia as a private citizen.  David returned to Palestine for 10 days in March 2018.

David has a Bachelor of Science degree in economics from the University of Maryland and attended classes at George Washington University for a degree as a Certified Financial Planner.  He is a graduate of the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania program for a degree as a Certified Investment Management Analyst (CIMA).

David resides in Clearwater Beach, Florida. His hobbies include boating, fishing, RV’ing and motorcycle touring. He is also a licensed skydiver (USPA-inactive).

The margin between what is a human right as an inalienable possession, and how it is seen in political terms is razor fine. In some cases, the distinctions are near impossible to make.  To understand the crime of genocide is to also understand the political machinations that limited its purview.  No political or cultural groups, for instance, were permitted coverage by the defintion in the UN Convention responsible for criminalising it.

The same goes for the policing bodies who might use human rights in calculating fashion, less to advance an agenda of the human kind than that of the political. This can take the form of scolding, and the United States, by way of illustration, has received beratings over the years in various fields.  (Think an onerous, vicious prison system, the stubborn continuation of the death penalty, and levels of striking impoverishment for an advanced industrial society.)

The other tactic common in the human rights game is gaining membership to organisations vested with the task of overseeing the protection of such rights.  Membership can effectively defang and in some cases denude criticism of certain states.  Allies club together to keep a united front.  It was precisely this point that beset the UN Commission on Human Rights, long accused of being compromised for perceived politicisation.

The successor to the UN Commission on Human Rights, the UN Human Rights Council, has come in for a similar pasting.  The righteous Nikki Haley, the US ambassador to the United Nations, had made it something of a personal project to reform the body. It was a body that had been opposed by the United States.  But reform and tinkering are oft confused, suggesting a neutralisation of various political platforms deemed against Washington’s interests.  Is it the issue of rights at stake, or simple pride and backing allies?

For one, the barb in Haley’s protestation was the HRC’s “chronic bias against Israel”, and concerns on the part of Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein, a UN human rights chief unimpressed by the Trump administration’s policy of separating migrant children from their parents.

Accordingly, Haley announced that the United States would be withdrawing from “an organisation that is not worthy of its name”, peopled, as it were, by representatives from such states as China, Cuba, Venezuela and the Democratic Republic of Congo.  “We take this step,” explained Haley, “because our commitment does not allow us to remain a part of a hypocritical and self-serving organisation that makes a mockery of human rights.”

The Congolese component deserved special mention, the state having become a member of the HRC even as mass graves were being uncovered at the behest of that very body.  Government security forces, according to Human Rights Watch, were said to be behind abuses in the southern Kasai region since August 2016 that had left some 5,000 people dead, including 90 mass graves.  A campaign against the DRC’s election to the Council, waged within various political corridors by Congolese activists, failed to inspire UN members to sufficiently change their mind in the vote. A sufficient majority was attained.

The move to withdraw the US received purring praise from Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, still glowing with satisfaction at Washington’s decision to relocate the US embassy to Jerusalem.  For the Israeli leader, the Council had been nothing but “a biased, hostile, anti-Israel organisation that has betrayed its mission of protecting human rights.”  It had avoided dealing with the big violators and abusers-in-chief, those responsible for systematically violating human rights, and had developed, according to Netanyahu, an Israel fixation, ignoring its fine pedigree as being “the one genuine democracy in the Middle East”.  The slant here is clear enough: democracies so deemed do not violate human rights, and, when picked up for doing so, can ignore the overly zealous critics compromised by supposed hypocrisy.

Israel’s ambassador to the UN, Danny Danon, did not restrain himself in praise.  The United States had “proven, yet again, its commitment to truth and justice and its unwillingness to allow the blind hatred of Israel in international institutions to stand unchallenged.”

The common mistake made by such states is that hypocrisy necessarily invalidates criticism of human rights abuses. To have representatives from a country purportedly shoddy on the human rights front need not negate the reasoning in assessing abuses and infractions against human rights.  It certainly makes that body’s credibility much harder to float, the perpetrator being within the gates, but human rights remains the hostage of political circumstance and, worst of all, opportunistic forays.  The US withdrawal from the Council does little to suggest credible reform, though it does much to advance a program of spite typical from an administration never keen on the idea of human rights to begin with.  The Trump policy of detachment, extraction and unilateralism continues.

Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge.

Australia is presently in the grip of salivating Sinophobia and the US lackey Australian Coalition Government with the support of the US lackey Labor Opposition is rushing through draconian, implicitly Chinese-targeting, human rights-violating   foreign interference legislation. Mainstream public discussion is almost totally confined to China, this ignoring huge UK, US and Apartheid Israeli interference in Australia. British devastation, perversion and subversion of Australia has been ongoing for over 2 centuries but these awful realities are variously largely or totally ignored by look-the-other-way Mainstream Australia.

The Mainstream Australian view of foreign interference in Australia turns reality on its head. No doubt China seeks to influence Australian policy makers and institutions, to gain information about Australia,  to interact with its  1.3 million-strong Australian Chinese diaspora and to interact with the 160,000 Chinese students studying in Australia.  Indeed other countries are variously doing the same thing. However there are obvious boundaries between such legitimate activities and illicit operations amounting to covert espionage and subversion. The Australian Government has every right and indeed a duty to police that boundary. However in addition to tightening up espionage laws, the Australian Government has dramatically over-reached in advancing draconian plans for a compulsory and all-encompassing register of “foreign agents” that amounts to a compulsory and false register of “people the government doesn’t like”.

Thus a scientist/ scholar in receipt of overseas research funds or a human rights or conservation NGO in receipt of overseas support would have to falsely register as a  “foreign agent” or face prosecution (with draconian custodial punishment attached)  by  US lackey Liberal Party-National Party Coalition or Labor (aka Lib-Lab) Australian Governments that are clearly, demonstrably and explicitly themselves craven  “foreign agents” for the US and more covertly for the UK, Zionists and US-backed Apartheid Israel.

In response to protests by academics, civil liberties advocates, lawyers, media, journalists, the arts community, charities, conservationists  and other NGOs, the Australian Attorney-General Christian Porter has put forward compromise amendments to the government’s proposed register of “foreign agents”: “This [amendment] ensures that only organisations or individuals ultimately working at the direction of a foreign government or political party are required to register… [would exclude] the vast majority of private international companies [except where] they are closely related to a foreign government or political organisation”. However any  US lackey, Zionist-subverted and Zionist-perverted Lib-Lab  (Coalition or Labor) Government would reserve the right to declare who it considered to be “foreign agents” [1] – an utterly unacceptable power akin to the secret Ministerial racial exclusion powers of the Australian Government  under the obscene White Australia Policy from 1910 to 1974.

Unfortunately, the pro-war, anti-environment and neoliberal Australian Coalition Government has a very poor track record when it  comes to human rights and civil liberties to the extent that the courageous and forthright former head of the Australian Human Rights Commission, Professor Gillian Triggs, stated “[Australia’s human rights] regressing on almost every front… Whether it’s women, Indigenous, homeless and most of course asylum seekers and refugees… I think it’s partly because we have a government that is ideologically opposed to human rights” [2].

China is a relatively new player in the game of foreign influence in Australia, this arising from its new status in the last decade as Australia’s leading trading partner. The Americans have been playing this game since 1941 and the nuclear terrorist Israelis since 1967. However the British Establishment  has been horribly perverting and subverting Australia for over 2 centuries. Australia was a  UK lackey until Pearl Harbor (1941) and the subsequent fall of Singapore (1942), after which Australia became a craven US lackey.  Australia has participated in all post-1950 US Asian wars, atrocities that have been associated with 40 million Asian deaths from violence or imposed deprivation   [2-9]. The Australian Labor Party opposed the Iraq War  but has cravenly gone  “all the way with the USA” since the US CIA-backed Coup that removed the progressive Whitlam Labor Government in 1975 [4, 8]. There is bipartisan support in Australia for the “lying Bush official version of 9-11”  notwithstanding a large body of opinion from  science, engineering, architecture, aviation, military and intelligence experts that the US Government was responsible for the 9-11 atrocity, with some asserting likely Israeli involvement  [10]. Since Israeli acquisition of nuclear weapons by 1967 [11-17], the US Government has become cravenly beholden to Apartheid Israel and the domestic US Israel Lobby [18, 19]. In turn, US lackey Australia has become second only to Trump America as a supporter of nuclear terrorist, racist Zionist-run, genocidally racist, democracy-by-genocide Apartheid Israel. A substantial proportion of the Australian Jewish community is fervently pro-Apartheid Israel and the wealthy Jewish community is a major source of election funds for the major political parties [20]. While Jews and Females represent 0.5% and 50%, respectively, of the Australian population, they represent 14.5% and 9.5%, respectively, of Australia’s richest 200 [21].

Most Australians, including myself, naturally have great affection for Mother England, for the linguistic and cultural quirks of Great Britain, for British culture and British humour . Nevertheless about 50% of Australians are republicans and would like to see Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II replaced as Head of State of Australia by an elected Australian. I am equivocal about this and argue that before Australians cut this link to the UK they should honestly face up to the immense crimes of the British Establishment and in particular those involving Australia. However Australia has inherited a look-the-other-way culture from the English and that includes resolutely ignoring the massive perversion and subversion of Australia by the Mother Country Great Britain, the US and by Apartheid Israel, the Zionist tail wagging the American dog. Indeed a Google Search for “foreign influence in Australia” yields 58,400 items and analysis of the first 50 reveals that 70% are about China, 4% about Russia, and 4% about Israel, with 22% being non-specific – there is no mention of “foreign influence in Australia” due to  the US, the UK or indeed any other further country.

To the end of honest appraisal of foreign influence in Australia, set out below in chronological order is a detailed and documented summary of British devastation, perversion and subversion of Australia.

1. British invasion, Aboriginal Genocide and Aboriginal Ethnocide.

Before the British First Fleet Invasion in 1788 under Captain Arthur Phillip, Indigenous Australians had been living in Australia for about 65,000 years. There were 350-750 different tribes and a similar number of languages and dialects, of which only 150 survive today and of these all but about 20 are endangered.  After the British Invasion, the Aboriginal population dropped from about 1 million in 1788 to about 0.1 million in the first century through introduced  disease, deprivation and genocidal violence. The last massacres of Aborigines occurred in the late 1920s but no Treaty has ever been signed. British dispossession of the Indigenous peoples of a whole continent was justified by might-is-right racial superiority and the notion of “terra nullius” or an empty land. The Aboriginal Genocide and Aboriginal Ethnocide continued after Australian Federation in 1901 and indeed continues today, notably through forced removal of Indigenous children from their mothers (the Stolen Generations) that continues at a record rate, removal of bilingual education and grinding poverty. Indigenous Australians were only counted  after a referendum in 1967 and were finally given some protection by the 1975 Racial Discrimination Act. In 1998 about 4,000 Aborigines out of an Aboriginal  population of 700,000 died avoidably  every year but the avoidable death rate has declined from 0.8% pa in 1998 to 0.6% pa in 2013, with still  circa 4,000 annual avoidable deaths out of a population about 700,000. Indigenous Australians are far worse off than White Australians in relation to housing, health, wealth, social conditions, imprisonment, avoidable death and life expectancy (there is a circa 10 year gap between White and Indigenous Australians).  The ongoing, 230-year Aboriginal Genocide has been associated with about 0.1 million Indigenous deaths from violence and a further circa 2 million deaths from imposed disease and deprivation [22- 41]. From a qualitative perspective  the British-imposed Aboriginal Genocide has been the worst genocide in human history [9, 23].

2. Australian complicity in genocidal British crimes in North America, Latin America, Africa, Asia, Australasia and Oceania.

Australians were subjects of the UK from 1788 until Australian Federation and independence in 1901 and were thus complicit in the genocidal crimes of Great Britain in the late 18th century and the 19th century, notably the genocide of First Peoples in Canada, the genocide of Peruvian and Amazonian Indians (for rubber), extermination of the Argentinian Indians linked to British commercial interests,  the Indian Holocaust (1,800 million Indian avoidable deaths from egregious deprivation, 1757-1947), the Opium Wars in China (up to 100 million Chinese deaths in the associated Tai Ping Rebellion), and residual slavery and brutal colonization in Africa [9]. Australians were directly involved in the subjugation of Sudan and the Boer War (in which the British confined tens of thousands of Afrikaaner women and children in concentration camps),  suppressing the Chinese Boxer rebellion, the Maori Genocide in New Zealand, and genocide through introduced disease in Fiji and elsewhere the South Pacific [28, 35, 36]. As a UK lackey or thence as a US lackey Australia has invaded 85 countries as compared to  the  British 193, France 82, the US 72 (52 after WW2), Germany 39, Japan 30, Russia 25, Canada 25,  Apartheid Israel 12,  China 2  and North Koreas arguably none [9, 28, 35, 42-47]. 30 of these invasions are associated with genocide [28].

3. Australia and British slavery.

Australia was founded on the slave labour of convicts and thence for 2 centuries on the effective slave labour of surviving Indigenous people on rural properties that has continued to within living memory . Indeed the  present-day state of Queensland (named, like the state of Victoria,  after the genocidal racist, world number 1 opiate drug pusher  and serial mass murderer Queen Victoria) still  refuses to hand back  wages  removed by the state from effective Aboriginal slave labour. The British abolished slave labor in the UK but readily replaced it with the effective, work-or-die slavery of British rural workers displaced by the Enclosures). Similarly  the British then abolished slave labour in the British Empire but replaced it with the effective slave labour of the Indentured Labour systems variously involving Indian and Chinese “temporary slaves” in the Caribbean, South Africa, Australia, and Fiji. Australian “Blackbirders” were heavily involved in the kidnapping of Melanesian South Sea Islanders (“kanakas”) for effective slave labour on Fijian or Queensland sugar plantations.

These adventures were associated with the entirely preventable introduction of disease that swept away huge numbers of Melanesians in a Fijian Genocide and a Melanesian Genocide  (the British and Australians knew about the deadly consequences of introduced  disease from centuries of European invasion of the Americas).   Thus in Fiji in 1975 about 40,000 Fijians were killed in a measles epidemic inadvertently (?) introduced from Sydney, Australia. The Fijian population was drastically reduced from 150,000 to 110,000, this necessitating the introduction of Indentured Labour (5 year slaves) from India (called “Girmityas” from mispronunciation of “Agreement”) to work on the Australian and British sugar plantations of Fiji, a brutal system that only concluded in 1920  (all the grandparents of my dear late wife Zareena Polya, born Zareena Lateef (1942-2018) , were Indian Girmityas in Fiji; her father, Abdul Lateef MBE, helped negotiate independence for Fiji from Britain in 1970) [9, 28, 35, 48-52].  In recent decades Fiji has been subject to extremely damaging subversion by Australia, America and Apartheid Israel leading to successive anti-Indian coups. However a presently stable and democratic Fiji is at the heart of a tussle for South Pacific influence between newly prosperous and commercially burgeoning China on the one hand and the endlessly subverting and perverting US and its lackey Australia on the other [52].

4. 19th century British rule, the Eureka Stockade, nascent democracy and British intervention over the 1901 Immigration Act (White Australia Policy).

Australia was founded as a penal colony and thence began a tussle between British authority backed by military red-coats and the democratic aspirations of ordinary Australians, whether ex-convicts or free settlers. One of the first  martyrs to democracy and free speech was John Callaghan who was sentenced to 600 lashes for petitioning Governor Arthur Phillip for freedom and supplies, and in doing so telling the truth that the Lieutenant Governor had advised him of this entitlement (the colony being short of food, an embarrassed Phillip accused Callaghan of lying, for which he was brutally punished with 600 lashes, noting that a convict had died after receiving a mere 30 lashes out of a 100 lash sentence) [53]. In 1854 the British red-coats brutally suppressed goldfield miners at the Eureka Stockade  rebellion at Ballarat in Victoria (27 people died, mostly miners, but the Eureka Flag showing the Southern Cross constellation remains a key symbol of progressive activism in Australia and the Southern Cross in on the Australian flag (white stars in a field of blue) together with the Union Jack in the top left corner (the British flag denoting  British imperialism) [54].  The Eureka Rebellion is known to all Australians but the contemporaneous  violent genocide of Victorian Aborigines assisted by mounted Native Police is resolutely ignored.

While Britain was brutally suppressing workers at home, in Australia huge, world-leading progressive changes were being made in the latter half of the 19th century with such innovations as free trade unions, state parliaments, votes for women, and free, secular  education. After Australian Federation and independence,  newly independent Australia wanted to explicitly exclude non-Europeans from Australia. However the British Government did not want to needlessly upset the circa 90% of its subjects who were non-European and the Colonial Secretary Joseph Chamberlain got the racist Australian Government under genocidally racist PM Edmund Barton to pass the racially non-specific  Immigration Restriction Act  of 1901 that did not specify undesirable races, left exclusion up to Ministerial discretion and which nevertheless came to be known as the White Australia Policy that lasted until abolished by  the reformist  Whitlam Labor Government  in 1974 before it was removed in a UK-US-backed Coup in 1975 [55].  The White Australia Policy started breaking down in the mid-1960s as many Asian students started attending Australian universities under the Colombo Plan. (Thus, , for example,  in 1966 I went to the Immigration Department offices in Adelaide to get an entry visa for my fiancée Zareena Lateef, a Fiji Indian. The officer behind the counter asked “Is your fiancée a prostitute?” to which I wisely replied, “No sir” and he stamped the visa, thus enabling over 51 years of very happy and productive marriage [56] that only concluded this year  with her sad demise after a long but cheerful and courageous battle against illness).

5. The European, UK and Australian WW1 tragedy.

WW1 was an immense and utterly avoidable tragedy for all concerned, including Australia that was roped in as part of the British Empire. Nevertheless conscription for military  service was successfully opposed in Australia in WW1 because of consciousness among Irish Catholic Australians  of the brutal British rule in Ireland and the memory of the British-imposed Irish Famine  (1840-1850, 1 million starved to death and 1.5 million fled overseas, with many dying in transit) [9]. 416,809 Australian men enlisted from a population of about 5 million,  62,000 were killed and 156,000 wounded, gassed, or taken prisoner [57]. Military and civilian casualties in WW1 totalled  more than 41 million, including  over 18 million deaths and 23 million wounded. The deaths included about 11 million military deaths and about 7 million civilian  deaths [58]. The flower of British  and Australian manhood was lost or mangled in WW1.

Most if not all of the survivors from this appalling carnage would have suffered trauma from the appalling carnage that inevitably causally impacted on a “traditional” Australian culture involving alcohol abuse, smoking, male exclusiveness, “mateship”, contact sport, patriarchy, racism, misogyny,  domestic violence, jingoism,  and a confused mix of anti-authority attitudes coupled with patriotic loyalty to authority  – attributes that have been variously addressed over the last half century by health workers, progressive people in general, expansion of university education,  and the increasing ethnic and cultural diversity after WW2. A measure of the war trauma can be gauged from the 21st century US experience in the US War on Terror  in which 32 million Muslims died from violence, 5 million, or from deprivation, 27 million, in 20 countries invaded by the US Alliance since the US Government’s 9-11 false flag atrocity [3, 10] . In contrast to this Muslim Holocaust and Muslim Genocide , US military deaths in the US War on Terror have totalled about 7,000 [59]. However about 20 US veterans have suicided each day in the last 2 decades [60] this meaning that 122,000 US veterans have suicided since 9-11.  About 80 Australian veterans suicide each year [61, 62], this indicating as many as 1,300 such Australian deaths since 9-11.

The war against Germany was utterly avoidable and tragic. The royal leaders of Britain, Germany and Russia were all first cousins as grandchildren of Queen Victoria (for details of those Establishment figures involved in the WW1 atrocity see William Gerhardie’s brilliant   “God’s Fifth Column” [63, 64]). France and Britain were traditional enemies only became friends and allies after the Battle of Waterloo (1815) concluded a century of ghastly, high technology world war between Britain and France. British policy since at least the 16th century had been to play off European powers against each other.  Indeed the very First Settlement of Australia in 1788 was clearly strategically linked to the 18th century British world war against France in India and North America [9, 28]. A further tragedy for Australia was that there was a significant German settlement of South Australia and Victoria. Indeed by about 1990 it could be estimated that 30% of Australians  could be  considered significantly  culturally German in the sense of German ethnicity, speaking Yiddish, speaking German  as a second language (many post-WW2 European migrants) or being deeply attached to German classical music (musically educated Australians loving Bach, Telemann, Handel, Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, Schubert, Schumann, Mendelsohn, Wagner, Richard Strauss, Johann Strauss, Bruch, Bruckner, and Mahler).

It must be clearly stated that we  honour all those who risk their lives in serving their country. However we must condemn immoral and war criminal politicians who commit their countries to  immoral and illegal wars. Further, Anzac Day is Australia’s most sacred war dead memorial day and is held on the 25th April, commemorating the storming of Gallipoli, Turkey, on 25th April 1915 by Australia and New Zealand Army Corps (ANZAC)  forces. The invasion was a disastrous British plan devised by Winston Churchill who is notorious for opposing UK  radar development prior to WW2 [64], the disastrous policy of bombing German cities in WW2 (instead of protecting Atlantic shipping) [64] and for the Australia-complicit WW2 Bengali Holocaust (6-7 million Indians died) [9, 35].  The Gallipoli invasion  was ultimately unsuccessful and the ANZAC (Australian and New Zealand Army Corps) and Anglo-French imperial forces withdrew in 1916 after huge losses of circa 300,000 killed or wounded on each side. There were 26,111 Australian casualties, including 8,141 deaths [66, 67]. Australia resolutely ignores the reality that the prior months of Allied naval shelling in the Dardanelles ultimately   precipitated the Armenian Genocide by the Turks that began on 24 April 1915 and ultimately killed 1.5 million Armenians. 24 April  is commemorated as Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day [68- 73].

Post-WW1 Australian jingoism reinforced by British jingoism has led to extraordinary  intolerance of people departing from the jingoistic narrative. Thus the 1962 Alan Seymour play about Anzac Day,  “The One Day of the Year”, led to banning and death threats [73, 74]. The 1983 march of 300 women on Anzac Day in Sydney “in memory of all women in all countries raped in all wars” would not be repeated today in pro-war, jingoistic Australia [75].  Pro-peace , truth-telling Australian journalist Scott McIntyre was sacked by the Australian Special Broadcasting Service (SBS) for merely making reference to the civilian downside of war on sacred Anzac Day [76, 77].  Colorfully-dressed, highly-visible, female, African, Muslim,  engineer and journalist  Yassmin Abdel-Magied ticked all boxes for bigoted targeting and  was  subject to massive  jingoist hysteria,  lost her TV program on the ABC (Australia’s equivalent of the UK BBC) and indeed left the country after  simply posting on her Facebook page: “Lest we forget (Manus, Nauru, Syria, Palestine)” (2017). Savaged by public outcry, Ms Abdel-Magied rapidly deleted the post and apologized [78-79].

6. British banks, the Depression and the sacking of New South Wales Labor Premier Jack Lang.

When the Great Depression hit Australia,  the Right (supported by Sir Otto Niemeyer from the Bank of England and invited to Australian by the Scullin Labor Government ) argued for austerity and deflationary repayment of debt,  whereas the Left (notably the Treasurer “Red Ted” Theodor)  argued for a Keynesian solution of public works and inflationary expenditure. The Australian Labor Federal Government and the Premiers of the states agreed on the austerity approach but New South Wales Labor Premier Jack Lang adopted a policy of ceasing debt repayments to Britain in these socially dire circumstances and was dismissed by the NSW Governor, the British-born  Sir Philip Game. The Keynesian approach was applied with great success by the Americans [80]. This episode was a precedent for the US CIA-backed removal of the progressive Whitlam Labor  Government in 1975.

7. Britain’s Australia-complicit 20th century Indian Holocaust.

The average life expectancy for Indians under the British before Independence was a shocking 27 years [48, 49]. Using Indian census data 1870-1950,  assuming an Indian population of  about 200 million in the period 1760-1870,  and estimating by interpolation from available data an Indian avoidable death rate in (deaths per 1,000 of population) of 37 (1757-1920), 35 (1920-1930), 30 (1930-1940) and 24 (1940-1950), one can estimate Indian excess deaths of 592  million (1757-1837), 497 million (1837-1901) and 418 million (1901-1947), roughly 1.5 billion in total or 1.8 billion including the Native States [81]. India was a 2-century British Auschwitz in which the vastly out-numbered British kept control  with the help of well-fed Indian soldiers by keeping the population massively deprived. Addressing the House of Commons in 1935, Winston Churchill stated of the Indians: “In the standard of life they have nothing to spare. The slightest fall from the present standard of life in India means slow starvation, and the actual squeezing out of life, not only of millions but of scores of millions of people, who have come into the world at your invitation and under the shield and protection of British power” [82-84]. Mass murderer Winston Churchill was responsible for the 1942-1945 Indian Holocaust and Bengali Holocaust (6-7 million Indians killed) that he totally removed from his 6-volume “The Second World War” for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature [35]. Australians as White members of the British Empire were complicit in this atrocity, the worst atrocity in human history. Australia was crucially involved in the British-imposed WW2 Indian Holocaust (WW2 Bengali Holocaust, WW2 Indian Holocaust) by withholding food from India from its huge war-time grain stores – 6-7 million Indians died from starvation [35].

8. British knowledge of the indefensibility of Singapore.

Wars don’t happen by accident and are crucially about acquisition of resources and geo-political hegemony. Further, the real combatants in high technology wars are the opposing war economies. British war-time leader Winston Churchill realised that victory against Germany depended upon the entry of the United States into the conflict as an ally of Britain and that this would occur if Japan could be induced to go to war. J. Rusbridger and E. Nave have published a very detailed account of their perception of how Churchill secured American participation in their book “Betrayal at Pearl Harbor. How Churchill Lured Roosevelt into World War II”. Nave was a Japanese-speaking Australian naval intelligence officer who was on secondment to the British Navy from the end of World War 1 to the end of World War 2. He was intimately involved in decoding Japanese naval signals and further testament to his credentials and responsibility is given by his period of leadership in the nascent Australian Security and Intelligence Organisation (ASIO). According to the account of Rusbridger and Nave (1991), in November 1940 a German raider under Captain Rogge captured the merchant vessel the Automedon in the Indian Ocean and it was found that the ship’s safe contained a Chiefs of Staff report approved by the British War Cabinet and destined for the Commander at Singapore. Recognizing the importance of the document, Rogge immediately sailed for Japan. After authorization from Hitler, the document was given to the Japanese who thus by the beginning of 1941 realized that the British recognized that British-, Australian-  and Indian-defended Singapore was essentially indefensible (I know that you know that I know … ). Rogge was awarded a samurai sword of honor by the Emperor – this award having only been made to 2 other Germans, namely Erwin Rommel and Hermann Goering [(Chapter 15, [35]; [85]). As in the disastrous Dardanelles/Gallipoli Campaign in WW1, Churchill deliberately put Australia in harm’s way in WW2 by successfully embroiling Japan and thence, crucially, the US. After the fall of Singapore 130,000 allied troops taken prisoner, including 15,000 Australians, and these POWs suffered highly abusive and deadly treatment.

9. British campaign for US war against Japan in order to win WW2 and the official UK-US and Australian narrative of Japanese threat to invade Australia.

According to the British ambassador in Tokyo, Sir Robert Craigie, in his report to Anthony Eden in February 1943 on conclusion of his mission to Japan, peace was still achievable with the Japanese in December 1941. Craigie was conscious of the theory that American participation in the War was so vital for victory that it had to be incurred at the cost of war with Japan. Craigie held a contrary view and felt that an American-Japanese conflict could curtail American trans-Atlantic aid. Accordingly Craigie had strongly favoured continuing Japanese neutrality. Churchill had a completely different view in hindsight (and one can also reasonably presume in foresight): he was highly critical of Craigie’s report and asserted: “It was a blessing that Japan attacked the United States and thus brought America wholeheartedly into the war. Greater good fortune has rarely happened to the British empire than this event.” Craigie considered that the Tripartite Pact between Japan, Germany and Italy may have been regarded in both Washington and London as committing Japan irretrievably to the War as an ally of the Axis powers – a view that he did not personally accept. In relation to the final breakdown of Japanese-American negotiations Craigie makes the critical observation: “There can be no doubt that the absence of any British moderating influence, whether at Washington or at Tokyo, increased the chances of that breakdown which eventually occurred”. At the  time of the Pearl Harbor attack (about which the British and Americans had foreknowledge from breaking the Japanese naval code ) Churchill was dining with Roosevelt’s special envoy, Averell Harriman, and the American ambassador, John Winant. The butler brought the news and Churchill phoned Roosevelt immediately to inform him that Britain would declare war on Japan. The conclusion of UK writer J. Rusbridger and top Australian Intelligence figure Eric Nave [85] is that denial of British naval intelligence information from the Americans allowed the Pearl Harbor attack to happen, turned a potential Japanese disaster into an American one and was “no accident but the deliberate policy of Churchill himself to achieve his aim of dragging America into the war.” (Chapter 15, [35]).

Australia’s war-time Labor PM from 7 October 1941, John Curtin, famously declared after the December 1941 Pearl Harbor attack that “Australia looks to America, free of any pangs as to our traditional links or kinship with the United Kingdom”. He disregarded British orders and brought Australian forces back from North Africa to defend Australia. Curtin described the fall of Singapore as “Australia‘s Dunkirk” and suggested it would be followed by the “battle for Australia”. Curtin’s perception has been the official and overwhelming Mainstream Australian narrative ever since [86]. However  Roger Pulvers (Australian playwright, award winning translator and journalist, especially in Japanese newspapers) discounts this core Australian and Anglo-American narrative: “Did, in fact, the Americans save Australia from the Japanese, thus earning our undying, obsequious and largely unrequited loyalty?  The answer is “No, they didn’t.”  Despite the early bombings in our far north and submarine attacks in Sydney Harbour, the plan to neutralise and occupy Australia was never taken seriously by the Japanese high command.  Such a plan did exist, but it was not considered a viable strategic option and was abandoned early on in the war.  What would they do with us once they had us?  The tyranny of distance to our major cities and ports and our sheer size were our saving graces. And yet it became important to the classes ruling us that the myth of being protected and preserved from harm by our bigger brothers be disseminated and reinforced as part of what ex-Prime Minister Howard called our core values.  If our sacrifices weren’t made in our own true interests and our role in battle not acknowledged, then to what end do we compromise our independence of thought and action for decades and decades to come?  Why should we follow the United States into every single major war that country has waged since the end of World War II?  Why should we subjugate our very identity to their versions of their national narratives? The war in Vietnam is the most telling case in point.  Not only did we participate in the cruel and illegal invasion of that country, but we also produced, in both Sydney and Perth, some of the chemicals for the herbicide known as Agent Orange that was sprayed throughout Vietnam, leading to an estimated 3 million people there whose health has been seriously affected by it” [87].

The Eastern Theatre of WW2 was associated with 17,500 Australian military killed in the war against Japan out of a total of 27,000 Australians killed in WW2 [88], 35 million Chinese deaths under the Japanese in 1937-1945 [89], 6-7 million Indian deaths in the Australia-complicit and British-imposed WW2 Bengali Holocaust [9, 35, 48, 49, 81, 83, 84, 90-95] , and many, many more thanks to Winston Churchill’s successful strategy.

10. Australian complicity in Britain’s  WW2 Indian Holocaust (WW2 Bengali Holocaust).

In the 1942-1945 Bengali Holocaust (WW2 Bengal Famine, WW2 Bengali Holocaust, WW2 Indian Holocaust)  the British deliberately starved 6-7 million Indians to death in Bengal  and in the adjoining Indian states of Bihar, Assam and Orissa. Australia was complicit in this atrocity by withholding food from India from its huge wartime grain stores [9, 35, 48, 49, 81, 83, 84, 90-95]. Successive generations of Mainstream British and UK-subverted Australian journalist, editor, politician, commentariat and academic presstitutes have succeeded in hiding one of the worst crimes of the 20th century and indeed of human history. This atrocity was associated with large-scale, military and civilian  sexual abuse of starving women and girls on a scale (perhaps 300,000 victims) commensurate with the “comfort women” abuses of the WW2 Japanese Imperial Army [35]. The notoriously child-abusing British Establishment was able to hide not only the horrendous child-abusing aspect of the WW2 Bengali Holocaust atrocity but the totality of the whole atrocity itself – ditto the UK-perverted Australian Establishment that also resolutely ignores the horrible reality that an estimated 4.4 million adult Australians have been sexually abused as children  [96-104].

11. Australia and British nuclear terrorism.

Australia played a key role in development of the utterly obscene British nuclear terrorism strategy through hosting the testing of British nuclear weapons on Australian territory at the Montebello Islands (Western Australia) and at Emu Field and Maralinga (South Australia) in the periods 1952-1957 under the Robert “Pig Iron Bob” Menzies Coalition Government [105].   These nuclear tests involved exposing British and Australian servicemen as guinea pigs (the British may well have also been involved in chemical warfare research in Australia that also involved Australian servicemen as human guinea pigs). The British also tested rocket delivery systems, notable the de Havilland Propellers Blue Streak,  a British medium-range ballistic missile (MRBM), at Woomera in South Australia [106]. Australia plays a key role in US nuclear terrorism and illegal and war criminal US drone strikes from Libya to Pakistan via the joint US-Australia electronic spying facility at Pine Gap in Central Australia.

12. UK and radioactive pollution of Australia.

The British also conducted obscene and dangerous tests involving the deliberate dispersal of radioactive Plutonium, Beryllium and Uranium over wide areas of South Australia (SA) near Maralinga in the period 1953-1957 under the Robert Menzies Coalition Government [105].   This scandal was exposed by Australian journalist Ian Anderson and led to demands for proper  clean up and compensation for displaced, contaminated  and otherwise affected Indigenous Australian populations. Maralinga in the remote western area of South Australia is the home of the Maralinga Tjarutja, a southern Pitjantjatjara Indigenous Australian people. The McClelland Royal Commission of 1984–1985 investigated the appalling nuclear contamination at Maralinga [106]. I worked with radioactive nuclides for about 40 years and the fundamental safety rule was to prevent or minimize exposure and ingestion by confining, screening and safely disposing of all radioactive materials – the deliberate, wanton dispersal of toxic and long half-life radioactive material over huge areas of Australia by the British nuclear terrorism degenerates utterly flouted basic radiation safety protocols.

13. Gurindji walk-off from British Lord Vestey’s Wave Hill cattle station.

The British having invaded Australia and declared “terra nullius” (“empty land”) proceeded as degenerate thieves to carve up a whole continent into variously huge pastoral holdings. Surviving Indigenous  people were employed as effective slave labor, being paid in tea, flour and tobacco (this in turn has contributed  to a presently huge and disproportionate Aboriginal respiratory disease , obesity, type 2 diabetes, diabetic retinopathy  and kidney failure health problems) [23, 27]. The 1966 Wave Hill (Kalkarindji) strike was a walk-off and strike by 200 Gurindji stockmen, house servants and their families at Wave Hill cattle station in the  Northern Territory that was “owned” by Vesteys, a British pastoral company headed by British baron, Lord Vestey. The strike lasted for a decade in which  Gurindji, led by Vincent Lingiari and backed by decent trade unions and progressive Australians  (notably author  Frank Hardy),  lived at a settlement at Wattie Creek (Daguragu). In 1975 the progressive Whitlam Labor government finally persuaded Vesteys to give the Gurindji back some of their land, this being an early key victory in the Indigenous Australian land rights movement  [108].

14. UK-US involvement in the 1975 Coup that removed Labor PM Gough Whitlam.

The Labor Government of PM Gough Whitlam was elected in 1972, was re-elected in 1974 and was finally removed in a US CIA-backed Coup on 11 November 1975 (Remembrance Day). A cowardly, greedy, dishonourable, traitorous  and “look-the-other-way Australia then elected the Australian Coup plotters [4, 8]. Outstanding  expatriate Australian journalist John Pilger on the US-UK, CIA-MI6 Coup: “Whitlam demanded to know if and why the CIA was running a spy base at Pine Gap near Alice Springs, a giant vacuum cleaner which, as Edward Snowden revealed recently, allows the US to spy on everyone. “Try to screw us or bounce us,” the prime minister warned the US ambassador, “[and Pine Gap] will become a matter of contention”. Victor Marchetti, the CIA officer who had helped set up Pine Gap, later told me, “This threat to close Pine Gap caused apoplexy in the White House … a kind of Chile [coup] was set in motion.” Pine Gap’s top-secret messages were decoded by a CIA contractor, TRW. One of the decoders was Christopher Boyce, a young man troubled by the “deception and betrayal of an ally”. Boyce revealed that the CIA had infiltrated the Australian political and trade union elite and referred to the [Coup effecting] governor-general of Australia, Sir John Kerr, as “our man Kerr”. Kerr was not only the Queen’s man, he had longstanding ties to Anglo-American intelligence… US diplomatic cables published last year by WikiLeaks disclose the names of leading figures in both main parties, including a future prime minister and foreign minister, as Washington’s informants during the Whitlam years” [8]. Whitlam was decent , patriotic and actually quite conservative  but before he was removed he abolished the White Australia Policy, racial discrimination, and university fees, brought Australian soldiers back from Vietnam, demanded transparency over Pine Gap, commenced universal health care, tried to “buy back the farm” from foreigners, and initiated actual Aboriginal land rights for the Gurindji. After nearly 43 years the British still refuse to release key correspondence between the Australian Governor-General Kerr  and the Queen   relating to the Anglo-American Coup against the democratically-elected Whitlam Government [109].

15. UK knowledge of ASIO role in 1973 Coup on 9-11 that removed the democratically-elected Allende Chilean Government.

Wikipedia reports: “An Australian Secret Intelligence Service (ASIS) station was established in Chile out of the Australian embassy in July 1971 at the request of the CIA and authorised by then Liberal Party Foreign Minister William McMahon. Newly-elected Labor Prime Minister Gough Whitlam was informed of the operation in February 1973 and signed a document ordering the closure of the operation several weeks later. It appears, however, the last ASIS agent did not leave Chile until October 1973, one month after the CIA-backed coup d’état had brought down the Allende Government. There were also two officers of Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO), Australia’s internal security service, who were based in Santiago working as migration officers during this period.  The failure of timely closure of Australia’s covert operations was one of the reasons for the sacking of the Director of ASIS on 21 October 1975. This took effect on 7 November, just four days before Prime Minister’s Whitlam’s own dismissal in the 1975 Australian constitutional crisis with allegations of CIA political interference” [110]. US lackey UK intelligence would have been intensely interested in this and would have been much more intimately aware of these matters than the Whitlam Labor Government that it helped to dispose of.

16. UK, Australia and the Iraqi Sanctions and Gulf War atrocities.

In the last millennium the British have invaded 193 countries (nearly every present-day nation) as compared to Australia 85, France 82, the US 72 (52 after WW2), Germany 39, Japan 30, Russia 25, Canada 25,  Apartheid Israel 12,  China 2  and North Korea arguably none [9, 28, 35, 42-47]. The British solidified control of conquered people by devastation, violent mass murder, genocide, mendacity and imposition of mass avoidable mortality through imposed egregious deprivation.  Thus to quote mass murderer Winston Churchill re enslaved India 4 years before he cut off grain imports to an already  malnourished war-time India: “In the standard of life they have nothing to spare. The slightest fall from the present standard of life in India means slow starvation, and the actual squeezing out of life, not only of millions but of scores of millions of people, who have come into the world at your invitation and under the shield and protection of British power” [82-84].   Serial invaders UK and Australia joined serial invader US in responding to the US-green-lighted Iraqi invasion of Kuwait with violence (0.2 million Iraqis killed in the Gulf War “turkey-shoot”)   and deadly sanctions that killed 1.5 million Iraqis (half of them children) through imposed deprivation coupled with Anglo-American and Israeli bombing that destroyed vital civil infrastructure  [5, 6, 111, 112]. Dennis Halliday (Humanitarian Coordinator in Iraq from September 1, 1997 until 1998) resigned after 34 years with the UN, including being UN assistant secretary-general, over the Sanctions  imposed on Iraq, characterizing them as “genocide” [5]. On May 12, 1996, Madeleine Albright (US Ambassador to the UN and later US Secretary of State) defended UN sanctions against Iraq on a US TV “60 Minutes” segment in which anti-racist Jewish American journalist Lesley Stahl asked her “We have heard that half a million children have died. I mean, that’s more children than died in Hiroshima. And, you know, is the price worth it?” and Albright replied “we think the price is worth it.” [5]. UK-US-subverted Australia played a dirty double role in the deadly Iraqi Sanctions – thus a document by me and tabled in the Australian Senate by Greens Senator Rachel Siewert estimated that over 20,000 Iraqi children died as a result of Australian Wheat Board (AWB) bribes that subverted the UN oil-for-food Iraq sanctions regime [113] . UK and US Intelligence services had to have known from the very start about the Australian Wheat Board (AWB) “Wheat for Weapons” kickback scam that diverted $250 million from the UN Oil-for-Food Program and funded the Saddam Hussein régime. Indeed by 2000 the Iraqi kickbacks arrangements were well known to everyone with an interest in trading with Iraq and the Canadians and Americans (competitors with Australia in the lucrative Iraq wheat trade) were officially complaining [113]. An Australian Royal Commission declined my evidence in relation to this atrocity.

17. British lying and the US Government’s 9-11 false flag atrocity.

The British Establishment and thence UK-subverted Australia have resolutely gone along with the “lying Bush official version of 9-11” notwithstanding the shocking realities that the Bush Administration told 935 lies about Iraq between 9-11 (2001) and the Iraq invasion (2003) [114] and that numerous science, engineering, architecture, aviation, military and intelligence experts have concluded that the US Government was responsible for 9-11, with some asserting Israeli involvement [10]. The UK BBC, like other Western Mainstream media including the Australian ABC (Australia’s  equivalent of the lying UK BBC) has gone along with the “official version” offered by the pathologically mendacious Americans. However the UK BBC slipped up badly when its New York reporter on 9-11 with WTC7 (World Trade Center Building 7) standing intact behind her reported the collapse of WTC7 about 15 minutes before it actually did. However the mendacious UK and BBC culture was quickly able to smooth over this extraordinary slippage. Indeed the BBC subsequently censored out its premature video “on copyright grounds” [115, 116]. The UK BBC and its equally degenerate and mendacious offspring, the  Australian ABC,  have an appalling record of fake news through lying by omission [115-122].

18. British WMD lies, Australia, US Alliance war crimes and the Iraqi Holocaust and Iraqi Genocide.

False UK and US intelligence claims of Iraqi possession of Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) were discounted by expert UN and intelligence officials before the illegal invasion of Iraq and were quickly shown to be utterly false by post-invasion inspections on the ground. UK lackey and US  lackey Australia immediately got in line with the Anglo-American lie, notwithstanding that an Australian Intelligence expert, Lieutenant Colonel Andrew Wilkie (presently an Independent MP for the Denison electorate in Tasmania in the Australian Federal Parliament), had resigned his job over the issue before the invasion, telling the ABC: “I think that invading Iraq at this time would be wrong. For a start, Iraq does not pose a security threat to any other country at this point in time. Its military is very weak, it’s a fraction of the size of the military at the time of the invasion of Kuwait. Its weapons of mass destruction program is very disjointed and contained by the regime that’s been in place since the last Gulf War. And there is no hard intelligence linking the Iraqi regime to al-Qaeda in any substantial or worrisome way” [123]. The illegal and war criminal invasion and occupation of Iraq by the UK, US and US lackey Australia under Coalition PM John Howard  was associated with 2.7 million Iraqi deaths from violence (1.5 million) and imposed deprivation (1.2 million), 5-6 million refugees and 0.8 million under-5 infant deaths, 90% avoidable [5, 6].

This carnage amounts  to an Iraqi Holocaust (a huge number if deaths) and an Iraq Genocide, with genocide as defined by Article 2 of the UN Genocide Convention thus: “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” [125]. The carnage of the Iraqi Holocaust  is also evidence of gross violation by the US Coalition including the UK and US-UK lackey Australia of Articles 55 and 56  Geneva Convention Relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War that declare unequivocally that an Occupier must provide its Subjects with life-sustaining food and medical requisite “to the fullest extent of the means available  to it”  [9, 126] .

Outstanding anti-racist Jewish British playwright Harold Pinter in his 2005 Literature Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech stated: “The invasion of Iraq was a bandit act, an act of blatant state terrorism, demonstrating absolute contempt for the concept of international law. The invasion was an arbitrary military action inspired by a series of lies upon lies and gross manipulation of the media and therefore of the public; an act intended to consolidate American military and economic control of the Middle East masquerading as a last resort all other justifications having failed to justify themselves as liberation. A formidable assertion of military force responsible for the death and mutilation of thousands and thousands of innocent people. We have brought torture, cluster bombs, depleted uranium, innumerable acts of random murder, misery, degradation and death to the Iraqi people and call it ‘bringing freedom and democracy to the Middle East’. How many people do you have to kill before you qualify to be described as a mass murderer and a war criminal? One hundred thousand? More than enough, I would have thought. Therefore it is just that Bush and Blair be arraigned before the International Criminal Court of Justice” [127]. 2.7 million? More than enough, I would have thought. Yet George Bush, Tony Blair, John Howard and their associates roam free. Indeed Howard was controversially awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of Sydney [128], notwithstanding  the opinion of John Valder (former National President of John Howard’s Liberal Party) that: “Bush, Blair, and Howard, as leaders of the three members of the coalition of the willing, inflicted enormous suffering on the people of Iraq. And, as such, they are criminals…I believe the only deterrent to a repetition of the Iraq situation is punishment in some form as war criminals” [129]. In contrast, Australian ABC reported on the occasion of the US withdrawal in 2011: “The withdrawal ends a war that left tens of thousands of Iraqis and nearly 4,500 American soldiers dead, many more wounded and 1.75 million Iraqis displaced, after the 2003 US-led invasion unleashed brutal sectarian fighting” – this being a 100-fold under-estimate of Iraqi deaths [5, 6, 130] that are of the same order of magnitude as those of the WW2 Jewish Holocaust (5-6 million Jews killed by violence or deprivation) [9, 35].

Of course the UN Charter determines that the only grounds for invading another country are (1) if it has invaded your country, (2) if its government has invited your intervention, and (3) if there is UN sanction (however as demonstrated  by the Iraq Sanctions carnage, this does not prevent commission of genocidal war crimes). These 3 criteria were not satisfied  in  the illegal,  war criminal and genocidal, US Alliance invasion of Iraq.

19. UK, Australia, US Alliance war crimes and the Afghan Holocaust and Afghan Genocide.

Although zero (0) Afghans were involved in the 9-11 atrocity according to the “lying Bush official version of 9-11”, and despite the ruling Afghan Taliban expressing willingness to hand over US-alleged 9-11 mastermind  Osama bin Laden to a Third Party government, the US embarked on a war criminal invasion of Afghanistan in 2001. On the basis of Iraq War comparisons,  the Afghan War has been associated (as of 2014) with  post-invasion violent deaths totalling 1.7 million (this based on assuming expert US-Australian advice that the level of violence has been 4 times lower in the Afghan War than in the Iraq War)  and ( from UN Population Division data) that in Occupied Afghanistan post-invasion non-violent avoidable  deaths totalled 5.5 million. Afghan under-5 infant deaths have totalled abut 3 million and Afghan refugees total about 3 million [6, 7].   To repeat, according to the UN Charter determines that the only grounds for invading another country are (1) if it has invaded your country, (2) if its government has invited your intervention, and (3) if there is UN sanction (however as demonstrated  by the Iraq Sanctions carnage, this does not prevent commission of genocidal war crimes). These 3 criteria were not satisfied  in  the illegal,  war criminal and genocidal, US Alliance invasion of Iraq. The carnage of the 16.5 year occupation of Afghan amounts to an Afghan Holocaust (7.2 million violent deaths or avoidable deaths from imposed deprivation) commensurate with the WW2 Jewish Holocaust (5-6 million deaths from violence or imposed deprivation)   and an Afghan Genocide as defined by the UN Genocide Convention. Of course the US-imposed war has been actually going on since 1978 when the US engineered the overthrow of a secular Afghan regime that in turn led to Russian invasion (1979-1989 Afghan excess mortality from deprivation totalling 2.9 million) [9].

The 2015 testimony of former US-installed Afghan President Hamid Karzai departs radically from the UK, US and Australia,  NATO and “lying Bush official version” narrative: “[Al-Qaeda] is for me a myth […] For us, they don’t exist. I don’t know if al-Qaeda existed and I don’t know if they exist. I have not seen them and I’ve not had any report about them, any report that would indicate that al-Qaeda is operating in Afghanistan… [re the US version of 9-11] That is what I have heard from our Western friends. That’s what the Western media says. There is no doubt that an operation, a terrorist operation was conducted in New York and in Washington. I neither believe nor disbelieve something that I don’t know about. I can tell you that Afghanistan was as much a victim of terrorism as was America, as were the people who were killed in the September 11th terrorist attacks” [131].

The most fundamental human right is the right to life. While legitimately criticized for the one party state, the death penalty, censorship, urban air pollution and harsh treatment of dissidents, China has been hugely successful in radically reducing infant mortality and maternal mortality in Tibet and in China as a whole. In stark contrast, the war criminal US Alliance occupation of neighbouring Afghanistan continues to be associated with an under-1 infant mortality and maternal mortality incidence that is 7 times higher and 4-12 times higher, respectively, than that in Tibet. Infant mortality (under-1 infant deaths per 1,000 live births) is 12 (China ), 16 ( Tibet ), 6 ( USA ) and 111 (US Alliance-occupied Afghanistan ). The Maternal Mortality Ratio (MMR) (maternal deaths per 100,000 live births) is 20- 27 (China ), 100 ( Tibet ), 14 ( USA ), 9 (UK), 6 (Australia) and 400-1,200 (US Alliance-occupied Afghanistan ).This constitutes evidence of horrendous US Alliance war crimes in Occupied Afghanistan in gross violation of the Geneva Convention relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War [126] and thence of the UN Genocide Convention [125, 132].

20. UK, Australia, US and restoration of the Taliban-destroyed Afghan opium industry.

Also utterly ignored by Neocon American and Zionist  Imperialist (NAZI)-perverted and subverted Western Mainstream media, including Australian Mainstream media,   are the 1.2 million people who have died world-wide since 9-11 due to US Alliance restoration of the Taliban-destroyed Afghan opium industry from 6% of world market share in 2001 to 93% in 2007, the breakdown (as of 2015)  including 280,000 Americans, 256,000 Indonesians, 68,000 Iranians, 25,000 British, 14,000 Canadians, 10,000 Germans, and 5,000 Australians [7]. It is one thing for UK- and US-subverted Australian Mainstream media, politicians , commentariat and academic presstitutes to ignore the dimensions  of the Afghan Holocaust and Afghan Genocide, but quite another for these cowardly and  traitorous presstitutes  to ignore the mass murder of Australians collateral to ongoing Anglo-American imperialism in Occupied Afghanistan [7]. As far as I am aware, only one major Australian Lib-Lab figure has demanded destruction of the deadly, US-protected Afghan opium crop, namely PM Kevin Rudd who was removed in a US-approved, mining Corporation -backed and pro-Zionist -led Coup in 2010 [133-137].

21. Blatant UK BBC lying over the US-asserted death of Osama bin Laden in 2011.

Governments lie but British and American Governments have made mendacity an art form. The “lying Bush official version of 9-11” has it that Al Qaeda “men in caves” led by (formerly US-backed) Osama bin Laden were responsible for the 9-11 atrocity. This version of events (that is slavishly accepted by US lackey Australia) has been seriously questioned because (1) the Bush Administration made 935 false assertions about Iraq between 9-11 and the Iraq invasion, and  (2) numerous science, architecture, engineering, aviation, military and intelligence experts have concluded from a wealth of evidence that the US Government was responsible for 9-11, with some asserting Israeli involvement [10]. President Barack Obama decided to add to the highly inventive “lying Bush” 9-11 narrative by claiming that US forces under his orders has extra-judicially killed Osama bin Laden in Pakistan in 2011.  The Obama story has been almost totally demolished by outstanding  US journalist Seymour Hersh (who won the Pullitzer Prize for exposing the US Mylai Massacre in Vietnam). Seymour Hersh accepted the premise that Osama bin Laden had been killed in the operation and that his body was quickly destroyed  by being dumped at sea – however Seymour Hersh commented thus (2013):  “Nothing’s been done about that story, it’s one big lie, not one word of it is true” [138-140]. However outstanding  US economist, academic and , and journalist Dr Paul Craig Roberts has dismissed the official 9-11 story as a lie [139] and has commented thus on Seymour Hersh: “Seymour Hersh has published a long account of the homicide of Osama bin Laden [140]. Hersh concludes that the Obama regime’s account of the killing of bin Laden is a total fabrication except for the fact that bin Laden was killed. I do not believe Hersh’s story for three reasons. One reason is that bin Laden was suffering from disease that no one can survive for a decade. His death was widely reported in 2001. One reason is that even Hersh’s “true” account of “what really happened” is contradicted by eye witnesses and the initial Pakistani TV interviews of eye witnesses. One reason is that Hersh’s story is too convoluted for an assassination raid, a routine event. He exposes lies within lies, indecision within decision, payoffs within payoffs, and reports such a huge number of people with advance knowledge of the raid that it cannot possibly have been kept a secret. I could add a fourth reason – the US government’s lack of credibility. Washington lies about everything” [141].

However the UK BBC made a further contribution to Anglo-American lying about 9-11 and Osama bin Laden by notoriously censoring  an Al Jazeera interview with Pakistan PM Benazir Bhutto by Sir David Frost on 2 November 2007 (shortly before her murder on 27 December 2007) in which she asserted in relation to an intelligence figure: “And he had also dealings with Omar Sheik, the man who murdered Osama Bin Laden”. The BBC re-broadcast the interview but astonishingly deleted that crucial and explosive sentence. The BBC offered the pathetic excuse that these explosive 15 words were deleted for reasons of “length” [142].

22. UK, Australia, the Muslim Holocaust, Muslim Genocide,  illegal drone attacks on Muslim countries and the ongoing Yemeni Genocide.

After WW2 the US “inherited” hegemony over Great Britain’s planet-wide “killing fields” (aka the British Empire) and thus commenced three quarters of a century of genocidal American violence across the Third World. In the 21st century the Zionist-subverted Americans embarked on a US War on Muslims  (aka the War on Terror ) that was waged from (West to East) Mali to the Philippines. The US War on Muslims has been associated with 32 million Muslim deaths from violence (5 million) or from imposed deprivation (27 million)  in 20 countries invaded by the US Alliance  since the US Government’s 9-11 false atrocity [3, 10]. The carnage of the ongoing, Zionist-backed Muslim Holocaust and Muslim Genocide atrocity is commensurate with the 40 million deaths carnage of the WW2 European Holocaust in which the Nazi Germans tried to outdo the British colonial record by  killing  some 30 million Slav, Jewish and Gypsy subjects [9]. The UK directly contributed combatant manpower to the violence in Libya, Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan and has used drones for bombing attacks in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan [143] . UK lackey and US lackey Australia has been complicit in all post-1950 US Asian wars, atrocities associated with 40 million Asian deaths from violence or war-imposed deprivation [9]. Australian forces were also involved with the UK in the Malayan Emergency and Confrontation  with newly-independent Indonesia.  In the 21st century Australia similarly contributed combatant manpower to violence in Somalia, Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan. Critically, the  joint Australian -US electronic spying station at Pine Gap in Central Australia is intimately  involved in US global nuclear terrorism and also  targets illegal US drone strikes in Libya, starving Somalia, starving Yemen, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan [144]. Both Australia and the UK are involved in the vile Saudi Arabian and Gulf State Yemeni Genocide, the UK by providing  arms and diplomatic support, and Australia by targeting US drone strikes against the starving Yemenis.

23. UK and Australian genocidal racism and complicity in the Palestinian Genocide.

The Palestinian Genocide began with the British invasion of Palestine in WW1 with an attendant Palestinian Famine  (100,000 deaths) and since then has been associated with a total of 2.3 million Palestinian deaths from violence (0.1 million) or from imposed deprivation (2.2 million). There are now about 8 million Palestinian refugees. Of 14 million Palestinians (half of them children) , 7 million  Exiled Palestinians are forbidden on pain of death to step foot in their own country, 5 million Occupied Palestinians are highly abusively confined without human rights in the Gaza Concentration Camp (2 million) or to West Bank ghettoes (3 million), and 1.8 million Israeli Palestinian Israelis  have the vote but exist as Third Class citizens under Nazi-style Israeli race laws. 90% of Palestine has been ethnically cleansed of Indigenous Palestinians and of the now 50% of Apartheid Israeli subjects who are Palestinians, 74% are excluded from voting for the government ruling them (i.e. obscene and criminal Apartheid). The per capita GDP is $1,924 and $876 for  the West Bank and Gaza, respectively, as compared to $39,000 for Apartheid Israel –  poverty kills and while Israelis violently kill an average of about 550 Occupied Palestinians each year, another 4,200 Occupied Palestinians die avoidably each year from imposed deprivation [145-168].

Australians were critically involved in the conquest of Palestine in WW1 with the Beersheba Charge of the Australian Light Horse on 31 October 1917 that led to (1) ultimate conquest of Palestine from the Ottoman Turks by Britain and a  massive Palestinian Famine, (2) the nefarious and racist UK Balfour Declaration of 2 November 1917  that gave Palestine to Zionists as a Jewish Homeland as an inducement to help keep Russia in WW1, and (3) commencement of the Palestine Genocide (2.3 million Palestinian deaths from violence, 0.1 million, or imposed deprivation, 2.2 million) that kicked off with the Palestinian Famine (100,000 deaths in WW1) and the Surafend Massacre (10 December 1918) in which ANZAC (Australian and New Zealand Army Corps) soldiers deliberately massacred about 100 male Palestinian villagers in retaliation for the shooting death of a New Zealand soldier at the hands of a disturbed and thence panicked Bedouin thief [169-172].

The genocidally racist Zionist movement significantly dates to genocidally  racist and Zionist ideologue Jewish British politician Benjamin Disraeli who opposed PM Robert Peel’s attempt to relieve the Irish Famine by repealing the Corn Laws, and held Ministerial positions (including that of PM in 1868 and 1874-1880) under the genocidally racist Queen Victoria under whom the British spread genocide across the world on 5 inhabited continents, including Australia.  Under  Queen Victoria the Indigenous Australian population dropped to circa 0.1 million from the pre-invasion 1 million. During Queen Victoria’s rule  500 million Indians died from imposed deprivation and 10 million were violently killed in reprisals for the 1857 Indian Rebellion [81]. Disraeli converted to Anglicanism in order to enter politics. From his novels and other advocacy Disraeli  is regarded as the father of Zionism by pro- Zionist Adam Kirsch [174] and anti-Zionist Mark Burdman, the latter opining: “There is one man who can properly be regarded as the father of Zionism and Nazism: Benjamin Disraeli. To omit Disraeli from a central place in the 19th century development of Zionism, agent historian Barbara Tuchman once said, “would be as absurd as to leave the ghost out of Hamlet.” As prime minister under Victoria in the 1870s, Disraeli was the overseer of Britain’s imperial design to secure a “homeland” for Jews as a British outpost in the Middle East, and a secret document authored by Disraeli became the manifesto for early Zionism in Europe. That much is admitted on the public record” [175]. Genocidal racism was entrenched in the UK until the 1960s (“the winds of change” and de-colonization) and indeed in  White Australia until about the same time  (in a 1967 Referendum,  White Australians overwhelmingly voted to permit the Federal Government to make laws about them,  and to “count” Aborigines as part of the Australian population, they having been formerly counted under Flora and Fauna Acts) [176].

The crucial “intent to destroy” of the UN Genocide Convention is rarely confessed these days but is clearly established by the evidence of sustained actions against Indigenous people (230 years by White Australians and 130 years by the racist  Zionists in Palestine). Politically correct racism (PC racism) in present-day Australia prevents outright racist or genocidal assertions. However the extreme right wing former Coalition PM of Australia, Tony Abbott, was accused of effectively declaring Australia to be “terra nullius” (“empty land”) before British settlement when he recently remarked in a breakfast speech to UK PM David Cameron and many others: “As we look around this glorious city [Sydney] , as we see the extraordinary development, it’s hard to think that back in 1788 it was nothing but bush” [177, 178]. In relation to the racist Zionists and the Palestinian Genocide we have the appallingly false Zionist slogan “A land without people for a people without a land” that commenced in the 19th century and still has widespread Zionist currency [179].  The same racist notion is implicit in British surgeon Sir Frederick Treves’ 1913 book on Palestine entitled “The land that is desolate” [180].

The most appalling racist sentiments accompanied the violent genocide of Indigenous Australians in the 19th century  of which the following are but a few examples: “They are the most degraded of the human race, and never seem to wish to change their habits and manner of life” (Reverend Samuel Marsden, the notorious clergyman and merciless flogging magistrate, commenting on Sydney aborigines in 1819); “The Native soon saw that in yielding to his natural aggressive impulses he would be opposed to those who were not only his equals in savage cunning and endowment, but his superiors by alliance with the Europeans” (Port Phillip Administrator Charles La Trobe in the 1840s,  commenting on the efficacy of the murderous Australian Native Police that he set up in colonial Victoria in1841);  “I have the honour to state that there are no aboriginals in my District”(The Reverend James Walker, MA, Minister of the Church of England, North Parramatta, 1846); “Of the Australian black man we may certainly say that he has to go. That he should perish without unnecessary suffering should be the aim of all who are concerned in the matter” (Anthony Trollope, 1873); “Whether the Blacks deserve any mercy at the hands of the pioneering squatters is an open question, but that they get none is certain. They are a doomed race, and before many years they will be completely wiped out of the land” (Harold Finch-Hatton, 1885) (Chapter 17, [35]).

Even ostensibly nice,  civilized and humane British intellectuals accepted a “savage” status and an ”inevitable decline” of Indigenous Australians. Thus the views of  Charles Darwin (author of the seminal “The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life” [181]) stated the following  in the January 30th 1836 entry in his “The Voyage of the Beagle”: “All the aboriginals have been removed to an island in Bass’s Straits, so that Van Dieman’s Land enjoys the great  advantage of being free from a native population. This most cruel step seems to have been quite unavoidable, as the only means of stopping a fearful succession of robberies, burnings, and murders, committed by the blacks, but which sooner or later must have ended in their utter destruction. I fear there is no doubt that this train of evil and its consequences , originated in the infamous conduct of some of our countrymen. Thirty years is a short period , in which to have banished the last aboriginal from his native island, – and that island nearly as big as Ireland . I do not know a more striking instance of the comparative rate of increase of a civilized over a savage people” [182, 183] .

Similarly the assertedly “progressive” and “civilized” British intellectual H.G. Wells in his acclaimed “The Outline of History” (published in 1919-1920) repeatedly put the racist, proto-Nazi, Social Darwinist line in relation to the genocide of Indigenous American, Australian and Tasmanian peoples e.g. “The daily  life of the Neanderthal man … While the waters were held up in the Polar Ice cap, the sea-level was low enough to enable Palaeolithic Man to reach Tasmania… The primeval savage was both herbivorous and carnivorous… half-putrid game” (pages 79, [184]);  “No doubt the ancestor of Homo sapiens (which species includes the Tasmanians) was a very similar and parallel creature to Homo Neanderthalensis” (page 80, [184]); “When the Dutch discovered Tasmania, they found a detached human race not very greatly advanced beyond this lower Palaeolithic  stage… They represented a Neanderthaloid stage in the evolution of true men. The Tasmanians of the early 19th century were less clumsy and brutish than their more ancient kinsmen” (pages 82, [184]);   “In one remote corner of the world, Tasmania, a little cut-off population of people remained in the early Palaeolithic stage until the discovery of that island by the Dutch in 1642. They are now unhappily extinct. The last [full-blood]  Tasmanian  died in 1876. They may have been cut off from the rest of mankind for 15,000 years or 20,000 or 25,000 years” (pages 130-131, [184]); “The American tribes over the great part of the continent remained at a level of Neolithic barbarism” (page 142, [184]); “[The Spanish] were as destructive and reckless as the early British settlers in Tasmania who shot at sight the Palaeolithic men who still lingered there and put out poisoned meat for them to eat” (page 776, [184] ).

The entrenched racism of the British colonialists  is exampled by  Dickens in “The Lost Arctic Voyagers” : “Lastly, no man can, with any show of reason, undertake take to affirm that this sad remnant of Franklin ‘s gallant band were not set upon and slain by the Esquimaux themselves. It is impossible to form an estimate of the character of any race of savages, from the deferential behaviour to the white man when he is strong. The mistake has been made again and again; and the moment the white man has appeared in the new aspect of being weaker than the savage, the savage has changed and sprung upon him. There are pious persons who, in their practice, with strange inconsistency, claim for every child born to civilisation all innate depravity, and for every savage born to the woods and wilds an innate virtue. We believe every savage to be in his heart covetous, treacherous, and cruel; and we have yet to learn what knowledge the white man — lost, houseless, shipless, apparently forgotten by his race, plainly famine-stricken, weak, frozen, helpless, and dying — has of the gentleness of Esquimaux nature” [185].

Famed British writer Dickens was a racist with a genocidal hatred of Indians as revealed by these comments he made in response to the Indian Rebellion of 1857 (the so-called Indian Mutiny)  in a letter to Emile de la Rue on 23 October 1857:  “I wish I were Commander in Chief over there [ India ]! I would address that Oriental character which must be powerfully spoken to, in something like the following placard, which should be vigorously translated into all native dialects, “I, The Inimitable, holding this office of mine, and firmly believing that I hold it by the permission of Heaven and not by the appointment of Satan, have the honor to inform you Hindoo gentry that it is my intention, with all possible avoidance of unnecessary cruelty and with all merciful swiftness of execution, to exterminate the Race from the face of the earth, which disfigured the earth with the late abominable atrocities” [186-188].  One notes that 2,000 British were killed in the 1857 Indian War of Independence (aka the 1857 Indian Mutiny] but the British may have killed as many as 10 million Indians in a subsequent decade of genocidal reprisals [189, 190].

British imperialist Winston Churchill had a pathological hatred of Indians, stating: “I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion” (Chapter 16, [35]. Churchill’s hatred of Indians expressed itself in the deliberate British starving to death of 6-7 million Indians (with Australian complicity) in the 1942-1945 WW2 Indian Holocaust (WW2 Bengali Holocaust) [9, 35, 48, 49, 81, 83, 84, 90-95]. In relation to the Australian Aboriginal Genocide and the Palestinian Genocide, in 1937, Churchill told the Palestine Royal Commission: “I do not admit for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher-grade race, a more worldly wise race to put it that way, has come in and taken their place’ [191].

The  Anglosphere countries (the UK, US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand) are variously based on genocide of the Indigenous inhabitants, but in the post-WW2 era these countries variously came to terms with this  genocidally racist past. Indeed Donald Trump and the lunatic right aside, it is now simply unacceptable in Western Mainstream society for Mainstream  politicians and other public  figures to express outright racism or support for genocide.    In  the case of the ongoing Palestinian Genocide,  the supporters of Zionism, a genocidally racist political ideology that has only been significant in the last century, have no such qualms, notwithstanding the Zionism-backing UK having otherwise given up genocidal colonialism by the 1970s. The Zionists routinely make frank assertions about the inferiority of the Indigenous Palestinians, Arabs, Muslims and Asians and the necessity of ethnic cleansing to preserve a Jewish-dominated state in Palestine. This should have (but so far has not) created a serious political problem in the US, Australia and Canada  that globally are number 1, 2 and 3 , respectively, in support for nuclear terrorist, racist Zionist-run, genocidally racist, democracy-by-genocide Apartheid Israel. For an alphabetical compendium of such obscenely racist Zionist  assertions see [157, 158]. Thus, for example, Golda Meir (Israeli Prime Minister 1969 – 1974) and one of the more verbally restrained genocidal Zionist psychopaths : “Any one who speaks in favor of bringing the Arab refugees back must also say how he expects to take the responsibility for it, if he is interested in the state of Israel. It is better that things are stated clearly and plainly: We shall not let this happen”, “There is no such thing as a Palestinian people… It is not as if we came and threw them out and took their country. They didn’t exist”, “How can we return the occupied territories? There is nobody to return them to”, and “This country exists as the fulfilment of a promise made by God Himself. It would be ridiculous to ask it to account for its legitimacy” [157, 158]. Benjamin Netanyahu (Israeli Prime Minister  1996 – 1999 and 2009-present) (1989): “Israel should have exploited the repression of the demonstrations in China, when world attention focused on that country, to carry out mass expulsions among the Arabs of the territories” [157, 158].

The genocidally racist, Jewish Hungarian founder of Continental European Zionism,   Theodor Herzl,  had a blanket description of Asians as “barbarous” (1896): “If His Majesty the Sultan were to give us Palestine, we could in return undertake to regulate the whole finances of Turkey. We should there form a portion of a rampart of Europe against Asia, an outpost of civilization as opposed to barbarism. We should as a neutral State remain in contact with all Europe, which would have to guarantee our existence” [192].

The ugly Australian and Zionist  racist reality has been exposed by a former Israeli Ambassador to Australia, Naftali Tamir, in advocating closer Australian-Israel ties (2006): “We are in Asia without the characteristics of Asians. We don’t have yellow skin and slanted eyes. Asia is basically the yellow race. Australia and Israel are not – we are basically the white race” [193]. UK- , US- and Apartheid Australia-backed Apartheid Israel remains the world’s only remaining Apartheid state and the only remaining race-based Western European colony in Africa or Asia. Political correctness and “we are not racists” notwithstanding, many White Australians still argue with various degrees of offensiveness for non-violent “assimilation” of Aboriginals. Australia under a fervently pro-Apartheid Israel (and hence pro-Apartheid) Coalition Government has now displaced the UK and Canada in this regard and is presently second only to Trump America as a supporter of nuclear terrorist, racist Zionist-run, genocidally racist, democracy-by-genocide Apartheid Israel.

Sven Lindqvist in his book  “Exterminate all the Brutes” explored the genocidal racism of Western colonialism up to and including the Nazi German lebensraum genocides in Eastern Europe in WW2 [194].  The definitive word on genocide comes from outstanding , anti-racist Jewish American scholar Professor Jared Diamond who in his best-selling book “Collapse” (Prologue, p10, Penguin edition) enunciated the “moral principle, namely that it is morally wrong for one people to dispossess, subjugate, or exterminate another people” [195] – an injunction still grossly violated today by racist Zionist-run Apartheid Israel and its racist, genocide-committing and genocide-ignoring US Alliance backers, including Apartheid Australia, a racist nation likewise created through forcible dispossession and the untimely deaths of about 2 million Indigenous inhabitants [178], atrocities that are exceeded 100-fold by the 2 century Indian Holocaust under the British  (variously with Australian complicity) in which 1,800 million Indians died prematurely  from imposed deprivation [81].

24. UK imprisonment of Australian hero Julian Assange.

Australian citizen Julian Assange is an Australian hero and a world hero for founding WikiLeaks and revealing horrendous US malfeasance, subversion  and war crimes around the world. Persecuted by Sweden since 2010 over sex charges that were finally dropped in 2017, since mid 2012  Julian Assange has been effectively imprisoned by the US lackey British Government in the Ecuadorean Embassy in London under threat of transfer to the US. Julian Asange has been highly abusively imprisoned under egregious threat for about 6  years for no offence other than finding sanctuary from deadly threat from the serial war criminal Americans [196, 197] . The US lackey Gillard Labor Government (2010-2013) and subsequent US lackey Lib-Lab Governments have refused to protect him. Australian PM Julia Gillard notoriously and falsely accused him of breaking the law over WikiLeaks [198]. WikiLeaks has revealed how  key pro-Zionist supporters of Julia Gillard in the 2010 pro-Zionist–led Coup against former Labor PM Kevin Rudd acted as “secret sources”  of the US,   reporting internal Labor Government  deliberations to the US Embassy [199]. WikiLeaks has also revealed how Labor PM Kevin Rudd suggested war against China to Hilary Clinton as an option ‘if everything goes wrong” [200] and how former  Labor Opposition leader and thence Ambassador to Washington, Kim Beazley, offered Australian forces in that eventuality [201].

These Julian Assange-revealed Australian secrets go to the heart of government and the present debate (such as it is in look-the-other-way Australia) about foreign influence in Australia. Thus former PM of Australia, Malcolm Fraser, who came to power in 1975 as the result of a US CIA-backed Coup, became increasingly progressive with the years and commented thus on the WikiLeaks revelations about Rudd and Beazley: “To participate in a conflict with China is totally contrary to our interests. Let me make one thing clear at the outset. I am in favour of the ANZUS treaty [between Australia, New Zealand and the US] , but I am well aware of its limitations. It creates an obligation to consult, but no obligation to commit armed forces on one side or the other… We now know that Australian ministers or prime ministers have given commitments to the US that have been secretly withheld, probably from their own government and certainly from the Parliament. The idea of partnering the US in a war with China, which comes specifically from Kim Beazley’s reported comments, is the ultimate example. A war over Taiwan would be an absurdity. The idea that we should participate in such a conflict is unconscionable and totally contrary to Australia’s interests and indeed to Australian security” [202]. The late Malcolm Fraser’s comments are critically pertinent to the current, US lackey Coalition-driven  Sinophobia and the Australian problem of being allied to an anti-China Trump America while China is Australia’s biggest trading partner. Will sane, informed, pragmatic, anti-racist Australians prevail over US lackey jingoism? [203-209].

25. Entrenched British mendacity over past crimes and Global Avoidable Mortality Holocaust.

The British Establishment lies egregiously but adopts the pretence of high morality. In Chapter 25 of his  novel “Candide”, entitled  “Visit to Lord Pococurante, Venetian nobleman” . Voltaire gets to the heart of the English Establishment problem: “Martin noticed some shelves laden with English books. “I trust”, he said, “that a republican must take pleasure in the majority of those books written with so much freedom”. “Yes”, replied Pococurante, “it’s a fine thing to write what one thinks; it’s the privilege of man. In all Italy people write only what they don’t think; those who inhabit the native land of the Caesars and the Antonines don’t care to have an idea without permission of a Dominican. I would be happy with the freedom that inspires the English geniuses if party feeling and party spirit didn’t corrupt everything estimable in that precious freedom” [210].  Numerous examples of British Establishment mendacity have  been given in this essay (e.g. the non-existent Iraqi WMD, the “forgotten” WW2 Bengali Holocaust, a millennium of genocides)  and many more can be given. Thus, for example, John Pilger (outstanding expatriate Australian UK writer and journalist) reviewing “The First Casualty” by Phillip Knightley (2003): “When I read the first edition of this remarkable book twenty-five years ago, I was struck by the following quotations. During the First World War, Prime Minister David Lloyd George told C P Scott, editor of the Manchester Guardian: “If the people really knew [the truth] the war would be stopped tomorrow. But of course they don’t know and can’t know.” The truth was reported, insisted The Times correspondent, Sir Phillip Gibbs (knighted for his services), “apart from the naked realism of horrors and losses, and criticism of the facts” [118].

The bottom-line parameter in considering the consequences of social policy is consequential avoidable death (untimely death, premature death, avoidable mortality, excess death, excess mortality) that can be readily estimated from UN demographic data as the difference  between the actual mortality in a county and that expected for a peaceful, decently run country with the same demographics. Since 1950  global avoidable deaths from deprivation have totalled 1,500 million and presently each year 16 million people die avoidably from deprivation on Spaceship Earth with rich countries like the UK, US and Australia in charge of the flight deck. The 1950-2005 avoidable deaths in countries occupied by the UK in the post-WW2 era have totalled 727 million as compared to that for those  occupied by France (142 million), the US (82 million), Netherlands (), 72 million) and Russia (37 million) [9]. So much for the much-vaunted New Elizabethan Age.

26. UK duplicity and the “5-eyes” spying on Australians for Apartheid Israel.

Australia belongs to the “5-eyes intelligence club” together with the US, UK, Canada and New Zealand, all of these Anglosphere  countries having appalling histories involving the genocide  of Indigenous  peoples [9, 35]. It is estimated that the Australian defence budget would need to triple from circa $30 billion annually if Australia was not belong to the US Alliance and the corollary “5-eyes intelligence club” [211]. However, but for massive Anglosphere lying,  there would  a heavy reputational price to be paid for this involvement with serial war criminal Anglo-American imperialism. Australia has been complicit in all post-1950 US wars, atrocities associated with 40 million Asian deaths from violence and war-imposed deprivation [9]. Australia is a cravenly loyal part of the Anglo-American  Alliance that has been conducting a War on Muslins (aka the US War on Terror) for 17 years this century. There have been 32 million Muslim deaths from violence, 5 million, or from imposed deprivation, 27 million, in  20 countries invaded by the US Alliance since the US Government’s 9-11 false flag atrocity in 2001 [3, 10]. Australia has been directly involved militarily in the invasion of Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan and has also played a deadly role in targeting illegal US drone strikes in a swathe of countries including  Libya, starving Somalia, starving Yemen, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and  Pakistan [144].  While the serial invader US commits these state terrorism atrocities for resources and hegemony to “make America great”, craven US lackey Australia simply participates for money –  it is estimated that without the US Alliance, Australia would have to triple its present $35 billion annual defence budget [211].

These wars have come at a huge but hidden cost to Australia. Thus this century 85,000 Australians have died  preventably each year (1.4 million since 9-11) and successive Australian Governments have committed to a  huge, $11 billion per annum, long-term accrual cost of helping America kill over 30 million  Muslims abroad  rather than saving the lives of 1.4 million Australians at home [212-214]. A further cost comes from massive civil liberties constraints and  massive spying on Australians collateral to the War on Terror, although only  2-4 Australian have ever been killed in Australia by jihadi  psychopaths.  However one member of the “5-eyes intelligence club”, the Zionist-subverted US,  shares this huge amount of bulk metadata and other intelligence on Australians with nuclear terrorist, racist Zionist-run, genocidally racist, democracy-by-genocide Apartheid Israel [215-217] .

27. Entrenched, UK-derived Australian culture of resolute lying by omission.

Australia has a look-the-other-way culture of resolute myopia and lying by omission that one supposes at the Australian Establishment level derives heavily from the mendacity of the cognate British Establishment culture (see item #25 above about entrenched British Establishment lying). No more comprehensive  example of this lying by omission is given by the recent Australian cricket ball tampering scandal. Australia has rightly reacted with shock and indignation to cricket ball tampering involving at least one quarter of the nationally revered Australian cricket team – it is simply not cricket and is cheating. However US lackey, pro-Apartheid, neoliberal Mainstream Australia largely  ignores  horrendous realities that indelibly stain the national reputation including endemic child abuse, endemic violence against women, horrendous preventable deaths, ongoing Aboriginal Genocide, ongoing Aboriginal Ethnocide and disproportionate complicity in US wars, Israeli Apartheid, the  Palestinian Genocide, the Muslim Genocide, the Global Avoidable Mortality Holocaust, ecocide, speciescide  and a worsening Climate Genocide. Indeed I have alphabetically listed 190 such huge realities that are either totally ignored or  resolutely ignored in the sense of lack of effective action  by look-the-other-way Australia [214].

28. UK Establishment-derived Australian exploitation of Royal Family niceness and altruism to hide British and Australian atrocities.

Brits and Australian are overwhelmingly agreed that Her Majesty the Queen is a remarkably and  admirably dedicated Head of State. However the massive coverage of the Royal Family (e.g. the Harry and Meghan marriage and the  terrific speech by the passionate African-American Episcopalian bishop), even in distant and more Republican Australia, rubs off  a general sense of niceness to British and Australian Government that is quite misplaced, as shown by the example of the non-existent Iraqi WMD and the consequent Iraqi Holocaust and Iraqi Genocide in which the UK and Australia enthusiastically participated [5, 6].

29. UK BBC and Australian ABC fake news through lying by omission.

Fake news is simply a new, Trump–popularized descriptive for media lying that occurs in 2 basic forms, lying by omission and lying by commission. Lying by omission is far, far worse than lying by commission because the latter can at least admit refutation and public debate. Western Mainstream media impose a huge burden of fake news on Western societies through entrenched and pervasive lying by omission that is well exampled by this present catalogue of horrendous Australian and British crimes that are ignored or effectively ignored through inaction by Australian and UK Mainstream journalist, politician, commentariat and academic presstitutes [117-122]. While post-war Germany embarked on a program of de-Nazification, the US Alliance including Australia awaits such exposure and cleansing. Indeed while the Germans  applied a post-WW2 CAAAA (C4A) protocol involving Cessation of the crimes, Acknowledgement, Apology, Amends and Assertion of “Never again”, the  US Alliance including Australia are still busily engaged on perpetrating an ongoing Muslim Holocaust and Muslim Genocide [6].

30. Jane Austen and the Black Hole of British History.

Jane Austen was a brilliant, acclaimed and exquisitely truthful English novelist. Jane Austen confined her subject matter to what she knew, the rarefied and comfortable  lives of the British One Percenters at the time of the Napoleonic Wars (1799-1815). Ugly contemporary realities of disease, mass poverty and mass prostitution at home and horrendous colonial violence and genocide abroad did not intrude on the quietude of her novels. However one can legitimately argue that the artist has the right to choose the subject, style, medium and palette.  Nevertheless the English Establishment has exploited a lionized Jane Austen to the illegitimate end of glorifying a British Imperial civilization that was hardly glorious [35]. Indeed Indian MP Shashi Tharoor in making his shocking critique of the British Raj in India entitled his book “Inglorious Empire”. Mahatma Gandhi when asked what he thought of Western civilization reportedly opined “What do I think of Western civilization? I think it would be a very good idea” [48, 49].

Australia has basked in this reflected glory of a falsely asserted, lily-white,   Jane Austenly Great Britain. Indeed “That’s very British of you” or “That’s very white of you” have gone into the English language as expressions of praise, and conversely we have the condemnatory “That’s not cricket”.   However Australians have  has modified the British “glorious civilization” narrative with addition of asserted Australian excellence at sport (yet about 2 in 3 adult Australians are overweight or obese [218]),  an asserted Australian bluntness and honesty (that hides an entrenched and mendacious “look-the-other-way” culture) and a tradition of the “fair go” (a “fair deal” for everyone that is belied by gross refugee human rights abuse,  wealth-based Educational Apartheid [219-221], 2.9 million people or 13.3% of all people living below the poverty line and 731,300 or 17.4% of all children were living in poverty in Australia [222],   rampant destructive neoliberalism and gross inequity [223-231], ongoing Aboriginal  Genocide and Aboriginal Ethnocide [22-41] , disproportionate Australian contribution to ecocide, speciescide,  a worsening climate emergency and  climate genocide [232-236], and continuing Australian participation in US nuclear terrorism, the genocidal US War on Muslims and US bombing of 7 impoverished countries [3-7].

The core of this dilemma is that the Anglosphere Lobbyocracies and Corporatocracies like the UK and Australia have ostensible freedom of speech but effective free speech is controlled by the One Percenters. A pertinent example is the present-day “effective free speech’ of British libertarian, reformer, historian,  Enlightenment philosopher and author Catharine Macaulay (1731-1791) who notably made the following “modern” statements: “Therefore man, by being born with the necessary means, is born a creature apt for reason; and a creature apt for reason is a creature fit for society” and “I know of no rational objection; nor can I think of any expedient to remove the well-grounded apprehensions of the different interests which compose a commonwealth, than a fair and equal representation of the whole people” [237] (one notes that female suffrage was gained in 1902  in newly Federated Australia and in 1928 in the UK).The lives of Jane Austen (1775-1817) and Catharine Macaulay (1731-1791) overlapped, Austen at her best espoused female empowerment through  clever and polite articulation of opinion (e.g. Elizabeth Bennet in “Pride and Prejudice”) [35] and Macaulay espoused general liberty and rationality  [237]. Yet Macaulay is essentially forgotten while Jane Austen is grandly immortalized  – thus Google Searches for “Jane Austen”  and “Catharine Macaulay”  yield 17,100,000 and 38,600 results, respectively.

Put bluntly, Brits and Australians continue to be egregiously and remorselessly lied to. Jane Austen herself has posed a germane series of questions that are directly relevant to this problem [my answers are in square brackets]. In her initially rejected first completed novel and posthumously published “Northanger Abbey”,  the heroine, Miss Catherine Morland, affected by the somewhat Gothic atmosphere of the Tilney family home and the romantic horrors of Mrs Radcliffe’s novels, conceives the fantasy that General Tilney (the father of her beloved, Henry Tilney) has done away with the late Mrs Tilney. Henry reproves Catherine as follows: “If I understand you rightly, you have formed a surmise of such horror as I have hardly words to -. Dear Miss Morland, consider the dreadful nature of the suspicions you have entertained. What have you been judging from? Remember the country and the age in which we live. Remember that we are English, that we are Christians. Consult your own understanding, your own sense of the probable, your own observation of what is passing around you. Does our education prepare us for such atrocities? [No] Do our laws connive at them? [Yes] Could they be perpetrated without being known, in a country like this, where social and literary intercourse is on such a footing, where every man is surrounded by a neighbourhood of voluntary spies, and where roads and newspapers lay everything open? [Yes] Dearest Miss Morland, what ideas have you been admitting?” [238]. Thus despite ostensibly being “surrounded by a neighbourhood of voluntary spies, and where roads and newspapers lay everything open”,  successive generations of mendacious British and Australian  Mainstream journalist, editor, politician, commentariat and academic presstitutes  have largely white-washed out of history (“Austenized”)  the WW2 Bengali Holocaust (6-7 million Indians deliberately  starved to death by the British under Churchill  with Australian complicity) [9, 35, 48, 49, 81, 83, 84, 90-95].

Final comments.

White Australia has had a 2-century fear of the Asian masses and of the Chinese in particular who were until recently colourfully dubbed “the Yellow Peril” and the “Red menace”. Australians are politically correct racist (PC racist) in that (right-wing populists like the One Nation Party aside) they wouldn’t dream of making explicitly racist comments but nevertheless have a dreadful and continuing record of engaging as UK lackeys or US lackeys in the penultimate in racism, to whit invading other countries  (the ultimate in racism being genocidal invasion and occupation).  Despite China being Australia’s biggest trading partner, 1.3 million Chinese Australian patriotic citizens,  and 160,000 students from China involved in Australia’s $20 billion per annum Education Export industry, the right-wing, US lackey Australian Coalition Government with  support from a cowardly and “wedged”  US lackey Labor Opposition is fast-tracking new draconian espionage laws and, most disturbingly  “foreign agent registration” laws that potentially impact academics, universities, charities and other NGOs (notably those concerned with human rights and the environment). Of course Australia must contain foreign espionage and subversion but the current bills go too far. Thus Greenpeace Australia Pacific: “Imagine being sent to prison for 7 years for planning a peaceful protest. I don’t mean participating in one – but for planning a peaceful protest. Under the proposed “Espionage” bill, that could cripple advocacy groups, whistleblowing, receiving classified information or obstructing access to Commonwealth property could win you a one-way ticket to a 20 year prison sentence” (see [239]).

Yet public discussion is overwhelmingly about “foreign interference” threats to Australia  from China and ignores the immense actuality of huge subversion and perversion of Australia by the US, Apartheid Israel and, as detailed here, by the UK .  Compared with the UK record of devastation, subversion and perversion of Australia, one surmises that newly powerful China has barely left the starting block. Indeed there is a strong case for blacking out the British Union Jack on the Australian flag. Please inform everyone you can – it is no doubt happening in your country too.