OMNI
CLIMATE EMERGENCY ANTHOLOGY #4
AUGUST 29, 2026.
Compiled by Dick Bennett for a Culture of Peace, Justice,
Ecology, and Democracy
What’s at Stake: 2020 (date of original writing) and still in
2026.
George Monbiot: “Some of us know what we want: private sufficiency, public luxury; doughnut economics; participatory democracy and an ecological civilisation. None of these are bigger asks than those the billionaire
press has made and largely achieved: the neoliberal revolution that has swept away effective governance, effective
taxation of the rich, effective restraints on the
power of business and oligarchs and, increasingly, effective democracy.
So let’s break our own silence. Let’s stop lying to ourselves and others by
pretending that small measures deliver major change. Let’s abandon the timidity
and tokenism. Let’s stop bringing buckets of water when only fire engines will
do. Let’s build our campaign for systemic change towards the critical
25% threshold of public acceptance, beyond which, a
range of scientific
studies suggests, social tipping happens.
I feel clearer about what effective political action looks like than I have
ever been. But a major question remains. Given that we have left it so late,
can we reach the social tipping point before we hit the environmental tipping
point?”
Kohei Saito: “. . . capitalism’s
demand for unlimited profits is destroying the planet and only ‘degrowth’ can
repair the damage by slowing down social production and sharing wealth.”
Darkest Pessimistic Prophecy: We are
doomed to climate chaos, dissolution of our civilization, and extinction of
thousands of species because homo sapiens will cling to their pleasures and do
too little too late to stop CO2.
CONTENTS
[Note on my two categories--
catastrophe and resistance: Exposure--telling truths of history, facts,
causes, and consequences of the emergency and chaos often covered up by propaganda--
is resistance; my 2nd category is direct opposition, civil
disobedience. –D]
CLIMATE CATASTROPHE
CATASTROPHE
COP21
chief, Alok Sharma,. “Time for
climate action is running out.” 2022.
Stephen Lee. “EPA Union Seeks Climate Emergency
Declaration.”
ENTER TRUMP. Staff, Grants Canceled.
Cameron Baillie. “4 Billion Dead by 2050.”
Justin
McCurry on Kohei Saito’s book Capital in the Anthropocene: capitalism,
profit system, growth, degrowth, post-capitalism.
Alankar
Kaushik on capitalism, floods, land use, “natural” disasters, metabolic rift,
resilience.
Ubirajara
Oliveira. Tropical “impact
of climate change [at present] may be
equivalent to 3.3 million years. . . .”
Margaret Flowers. “Politicians Continue To Fail On Climate;
We Must Fight For A Livable Future.”
Lindsey German. “Climate Change: Too Hot
for Our Rulers to Handle”: temperatures at record highs, profits prevent
protection.
Alberto Garzón Espinosa. “The
Limits to Growth: Ecosocialism or Barbarism.”
Tom Engelhardt, “Michael Klare, Saying Goodbye to
Planet Earth?”
RESISTANCE
Plautz. Books for Children in a Warming World.
Sadaswam and Paterson. Landmark Climate Ruling
for Reparations.
Roger Hallam. Suicide. Indictment of Legal System that Punishes
Resisters.
George Monbiot. “System Change is…Our
Only Realistic Means of Defending the Living Planet.”
John Bellamy Foster. “Socialism and
Ecological Survival.”
Guillot. “Extinction Rebellion
Activists.”
NOVA. “Can We Cool the Planet?”
TEXTS
CATASTROPHE, EMERGENCY, CHAOS
COP21
chief, Alok Sharma,. “Time for
climate action is running out.” 2022.
Progress toward limiting the global temperature
increase to 1.5 degrees Celsius has been limited and too slow, warns
Alok Sharma, president of the 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference. If action is not accelerated, next year's
status assessment "will make clear that we are not delivering on the Paris
goals, that 1.5 degrees is moving further -- and frankly irreversibly --
out of reach, and that we risk going beyond our limits to adapt," Sharma
says. Full Story: Anadolu
Agency (Turkey) (7/21) . UN Global Smart Brief, 7-22-22.
“EPA Union Seeks Climate Emergency
Declaration”
By Stephen Lee, Bloomberg Law. PopularResistance.org
(5-7-22). The EPA’s biggest union,
signaling its dissatisfaction with the White House’s level of action on
climate, will ask the Biden administration to declare a national climate
emergency and take other ambitious steps on the environment. The declaration of
a national emergency would kick-start 123 statutory powers that aren’t
otherwise available to the executive branch, according to the Brennan
Center for Justice. Included among them is the hiring of more climate
scientists, engineers, and lawyers at the EPA, a goal shared by both the
American Federation of Government Employees Council 238 and the Biden
administration. -more- [Initially I placed this report in Part II,
but switched it to Part I when Trump became President. Here’s what AI reports: AI Overview. The
initiative by the EPA's
American Federation of Government Employees Council 238 union—which demanded a climate
emergency declaration and a major influx of climate-focused hiring—saw initial
staff expansion under the Biden administration funded by the Inflation
Reduction Act, but it has since been systematically dismantled and reversed.]
ENTER TRUMP By 2025:
E&E News by POLITICO
What EPA’s reorganization could mean for its climate staff
May 2, 2025 — Nearly 200 environmental justice staff have
already been told their positions will be terminated as of July 31. Recently
hired, “p...
E&E News by POLITICO
EPA terminates $20B in Biden climate grants - E&E News
by POLITICO
Mar 12, 2025 — On Tuesday evening, EPA Administrator Lee
Zeldin terminated $20 billion in climate change grants issued by the Biden
administratio...
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (.gov)
EPA Terminates Biden’s Environmental Justice, DEI Arms of
Agency
Mar 12, 2025 — The EPA is taking this action in conjunction
with other historic actions to advance President Trump's Day One executive
orders. Th...
ETC!
“Climate Crisis Report Predicts Four Billion
Dead By 2050”
by Cameron
Baillie, The Canary. Popular Resistance.org
(8-23-26). A
new climate-focused campaign group, 4 Billion Dead, has launched in
response to a buried report that its name could become reality. It urges people
to wake up to our impending disaster of untold proportions. 4 Billion Dead
takes its name from a 2025 report by the Institute and Faculty of
Actuaries, in conjunction with the University of Exeter. Its superficially
cheery-sounding name glosses over its worst predictions: Planetary Solvency –
finding our balance with nature: Global risk management for human prosperity
The report comes from professionals whose entire careers and profits are... -more-
Justin
McCurry . “The Marxist,
post-capitalist, green manifesto captivating Japan.” The Guardian.
Kohei Saito’s book “Capital in the
Anthropocene” (Editor’s note: Building upon his first ever book, published by MRP in 2017, and not to be confused
with John Bellamy Foster’s new book Capitalism
and the Anthropocene) has become an unlikely hit among younger readers.
The climate crisis will spiral out of control unless the
world applies “emergency brakes” to capitalism and devises a “new way of
living”, according to a Japanese academic whose book on Marxism and the
environment has become a surprise bestseller.
The message from Kohei Saito, an associate professor at Tokyo
University, is simple: capitalism’s demand for unlimited profits is
destroying the planet and only “degrowth” can repair the damage by slowing down
social production and sharing wealth.
In practical terms, that means an end to mass production and
the mass consumption of wasteful goods such as fast fashion. In Capital
in the Anthropocene, Saito also advocates decarbonisation through
shorter working hours and prioritising essential “labour-intensive” work such
as caregiving.
‘I was as surprised as everyone else’
Few would have expected Saito’s Japanese-language solution to
the climate crisis to have much appeal outside leftwing academia and politics.
Instead, the book – which was inspired by Karl Marx’s writings on the
environment – has become an unlikely hit, selling more than half a million
copies since it was published in September 2000.
As the world confronts more evidence of the effects of climate
change – from floods in Pakistan to heatwaves in Britain – rampant inflation
and the energy crisis, Saito’s vision of a more sustainable, post-capitalist
world will appear in an academic text to be published next year by Cambridge
University Press [Marx in the Anthropocene], with an English
translation of his bestseller to follow.
“It is broadly about what’s going on in the world … about the
climate crisis and what we should do about it,” Saito said in an interview with
the Guardian. “I advocate for degrowth and going beyond capitalism.”
The mere mention of the world degrowth conjures negative images
of wealthy societies plunged into a dark age of shrinking economies and
declining living standards. Saito admits that he thought a book that draws on
strands of Marxism as a solution to modern-day ills would be a tough sell in
Japan, where the same conservative party has dominated politics for the best
part of 70 years.
“People accuse me of wanting to go back to the [feudal] Edo
period [1603-1868] … and I think the same sort of image persists in the UK and
the US,” he said. “Against that background, for the book to sell over 500,000
copies is astonishing. I was as surprised as everyone else.”
The 35-year-old needn’t have worried about using the language of
radical change; as the world emerges from the pandemic and confronts the
existential threat posed by global heating, disillusionment with the economic
status quo has given him a receptive audience.
The pandemic has magnified inequalities in
advanced economies, and between the global north and south – and the book
struck a nerve with younger Japanese. . . .
“How
many floods must we witness before we admit we are fools?” Originally published: Lamjai on August 20, 2026 by
Alankar Kaushik (more
by Lamjai). (Posted Aug 24, 2026).
Agriculture, Climate Change, Ecology, EnvironmentGlobalNewswire.
The water will recede. It always does. What
matters is what we do in the months it leaves us. The post How many floods must we witness before we
admit we are fools? appeared first on MR Online..
. . .So the honest
question is not why does Assam flood? We know
why. The honest question is: how many floods must we witness
before we admit we are fools?
This is not an
accusation against the people who live with the water. Farmers in Golaghat,
families in Sivasagar, communities across Charaideo and Jorhat have shown a
depth of practical knowledge about rivers and survival that no policy document
can match. The foolishness in question belongs to those of us planners,
industries, governments, and citizens at a safe remove, who watch the same disaster
occur and continue to reproduce the exact conditions that turn a flood into a
catastrophe.
When “natural” becomes an alibi
Rain is natural. Rivers are natural. The
monsoon is natural. But a flood becoming a catastrophe killing people, erasing
villages that never used to flood, displacing hundreds of thousands in a single
season is not a fact of weather. It is a fact of land use.
Assam’s forests have
been extracted for more than a century, first for colonial tea and timber, then
for coal and oil. Its wetlands, which once absorbed and slowed the tributaries
the way a body absorbs shock, have been drained, encroached upon, and paved.
Its embankments, built to fight the river rather than accommodate it, have aged
past protection while unregulated mining upstream keeps loading them with
sediment. None of this is secret. Every disaster report names it in the same
apologetic clause: “unplanned development.”
Calling the flood a “natural
disaster” is convenient because it lets responsibility evaporate with the
clouds. The rain becomes the villain, the river becomes an antagonist,
geography becomes destiny and nobody has to answer for a lost wetland or a
mining lease. But once we ask why the
wetlands disappeared, why settlements
were permitted onto active floodplains, why embankments
keep failing in the same places, and whose profit
these transformations served, the flood stops being natural and becomes
political. It becomes the result of decisions. And decisions, unlike rain, can
be changed.
The rift beneath the water
John Bellamy Foster’s
concept of the metabolic rift describes exactly this mechanism: a mode
of production that treats nature as an inexhaustible reservoir for extraction
while ignoring its capacity always finite to regenerate and absorb shock.
Assam’s landscape is a textbook case. The forest becomes timber. The hill
becomes a mining site. The wetland becomes “unused” land, then real estate. The
river becomes either an energy source or an obstacle to be controlled. In each
case, the ecological function of the system its role in absorbing water, filtering
sediment, buffering excess disappears from the ledger until disaster makes its
absence impossible to deny.
The
flood is usually described
as nature’s failure. It would be more accurate to call it the success of a
system that never accounted for nature to begin with. The river is not taking
revenge. It is simply doing, in the only way physics allows, what a landscape stripped
of its buffers will always eventually do.
The politics disguised as resilience
There is a specific
kind of foolishness [insanity] in doing the same thing every year and expecting
a different outcome. We declare emergencies, distribute relief, repair
embankments, and speak solemnly of resilience and then wait for the same rivers
to rise into the same unprotected villages twelve months later.
At what point does
repetition become policy by default? At what point does “preparedness” quietly
become an admission that disaster has been accepted as permanent?
“Resilience” deserves particular scrutiny here. It is a legitimate concept when it names a
community’s capacity to recover. It becomes dangerous when it substitutes for
prevention, when the same populations are asked, year after year, to
demonstrate resilience while the structures that manufacture their
vulnerability go untouched. We praise the resilient farmer, the resilient
child, the resilient village. We rarely ask why they are being forced, on an
annual basis, to prove it.
Trauma does not recede with the water
The deepest failure in
how floods are discussed is that we measure them only by their visible peak,
the submerged house, the rescue boat, the body count and consider the story
finished when the water goes down. But trauma does not follow the
hydrological cycle. . . .
“Impact
of climate change may be equivalent to 3.3 million years of transformations in
tropical vegetation.” Editor. mronline.org (8-22-26).
Species that have evolved in stable
environments, shaped by millions of years of constancy, may be the first to
suffer.
Originally
published: The Conversation on July 28, 2026 by Ubirajara Oliveira (more by The Conversation) | (Posted Aug
21, 2026)
Climate Change, EnvironmentGlobalNewswire
. . .The projections for 2050, under the highest emissions scenario,
indicate that temperatures in the tropics could rise by between two and
four degrees Celsius. In the Amazon, the increase could reach four degrees. The
combination of heat and drought could transform dense forests into open
vegetation. The Amazon could lose more than a third of its forests.
The Malay Archipelago
(Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Brunei, East Timor, and Papua New
Guinea), which has remained stable for 3.3 million years, could see its forests
reduced by more than 40%. The magnitude of these changes is comparable to what has
occurred over millions of years. The difference is the time they will take to
happen. The post Impact of climate change may be equivalent to 3.3 million years
of transformations in tropical vegetation appeared first on MR Online.
“Politicians Continue To Fail On Climate; We Must Fight For A
Livable Future”
By Margaret Flowers, Clearing the FOG. Popular Resistance.org
(5-10-22). The Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change issued its sixth report in three phases
beginning in August, 2021 and concluding in April 2022. The first report
declared that the climate crisis is unquestionably due to human activity and
called the situation a 'Code Red for Humanity.' The second and third parts
indicated that not enough action is being taken not just to mitigate the crisis
but also to adapt to it. Clearing the FOG speaks with Professor
Benjamin Horton of the Earth Observatory of Singapore about the gravity
of the crisis, including that some impacts such as sea level rise... -more-
“Climate change: Too hot for our rulers to handle” by Lindsey German on climate chaos and
capitalism’s inability to deal with it. (Posted Jun 30, 2026). Originally published: Counterfire on June 29, 2026 (more by Counterfire). Climate Change, Ecology, EnvironmentEurope, GlobalNewswire.
Europe is burning. Temperatures
are at record levels. Its major capital cities—London, Berlin, Paris, have had
highs in the past week of top 30s or even over 40 degrees. In London there have
been two record-breaking heatwaves in a month. This is early in the summer,
before the traditionally hottest months of July and August. Schools have been
closed, rail journeys curtailed, offices shut, crops destroyed, open-air events
cancelled, health services stretched.
This is the climate emergency
[chaos –D] that campaigners have been warning of for years. For many of those
years, they were ignored or ridiculed, while climate change deniers were feted
by the BBC and scientific evidence ignored. Then when governments did take more
notice, they agreed a series of international policies which were always
inadequate, too often evaded, and under constant political attack.
Now however—in the
face of such overwhelming evidence that we are at burning point—governments
are showing themselves incapable of dealing with this huge crisis, and policies
are moving in the opposite direction. Hence the row even within the Labour
Party about Heathrow’s third runway, or about drilling in the North Sea. Hence
the rolling back of deadlines for electric car provision, or the lifting of
building regulations to help developers, or the cutting of grants for heat
pumps and insulation.
The harsh truth is
that capitalists will always override concerns on climate change and
safety more generally in the interests of profit. Any attempt to
restrict the ‘freedom’ to make money by the state is constantly lobbied against
and very often defeated. This disregard for the safety of the population is
justified in the name of competition and the needs of big business. . . .
Editor.
mronline.org (7-1-26).
“The Limits to Growth:
Ecosocialism or Barbarism” by
Alberto Garzón Espinosa (July 5, 2022). Mronline.org
(7-2-22).
A major deficiency of the growth-obsessed model driving global
neoliberal economic policy is its lack of understanding on the Earth System on
which it—and indeed, all life on Earth—relies. | more…
[See
Dick Bennett. CLIMATE MEMO MONDAYS, #84, JULY 18, 2022.]
Tom Engelhardt,
TomGram, TomDispatch. “Michael
Klare, Saying Goodbye to Planet Earth?” May 22, 2022.
The signs are
everywhere. If you happen to live in the United States, parts of the
Southwest and West are broiling in a megadrought the likes of which hasn't been
experienced in at least 1,200 years; water is increasingly scarce; and fires are flaring months early and in a staggering fashion, with acres
burned already significantly above the normal yearly average. Consider it nothing short
of historic in the grimmest imaginable sense. If you live on the East coast, on
the other hand, it's just possible that your house may float away as some are
already beginning to do on North Carolina's Outer Banks; while, in case you
hadn't noticed, losses of global wetlands are indeed significantly on the rise across the planet.
Should you happen
to live in Iraq, however, it's probably the repeated disastrous dust storms that are on your mind. After all, there used to be
only a couple a year. Now, there are 20 or so annually. In India and
Pakistan, on the other hand, unprecedented spring temperatures, rising repeatedly to 120 degrees Fahrenheit in both
countries (and the electricity shortages accompanying them) undoubtedly caught
your attention. Meanwhile, in Russian Siberia, the permafrost is thawing more rapidly, releasing greenhouse gasses into the
atmosphere at an ever increasing rate. In Australia, on the other hand, marine
heat waves have caused widespread mass bleachings of coral reefs, with
the fourth of them in the last seven years taking place this spring. In
South Africa, it's extreme rainfall and the resulting record spring flooding,
now twice as likely to occur as in the past, that's devastating.
Okay, I'll stop
there for now. Sadly, all of this (and so much more) is just the beginning on a
planet that's overheating all too quickly. Worse yet, as TomDispatch regular Michael
Klare, author of All
Hell Breaking Loose: The Pentagon’s Perspective on Climate Change, makes clear today, the war in Ukraine is the last thing
on Earth (so to speak) that we need right now. For reasons he explains vividly,
it seems to ensure the worst when it comes to climate change on a planet where
humanity is already at war with nature and it's starting to strike back in a
big way. Tom
The Ukraine War's Collateral
Damage: The Health of an Overheating World Is at Stake” By
Michael Klare (May 20, 2022).
The war in
Ukraine has already caused massive death and destruction, with more undoubtedly
to come as the fighting intensifies in the country’s east and south. Many
thousands of soldiers and civilians have already been killed or wounded, some
13 million Ukrainians have been forced from their homes, and an estimated one-third of the country's infrastructure has been destroyed.
Worse yet, that war’s brutal consequences have in no way been limited to
Ukraine and Russia: hunger and food insecurity are increasing across Africa, Asia, and the Middle East as grain
deliveries from two of the world’s leading wheat producers have been severed.
People are also suffering globally from another harsh consequence of that war:
soaring fuel prices. And yet even those manifestations of the war's “collateral
damage” don't come close to encompassing what could be the greatest casualty of
all: planet Earth itself.
Any major war
will, of course, inflict immense harm on the environment and Ukraine's
no exception. Although far from over, the fighting there has already resulted
in widespread habitat and farmland destruction, while attacks on fuel-storage facilities (crucial targets for both sides) and the wartime consumption of fossil
fuels have already released colossal amounts of carbon into the
atmosphere. But however detrimental they may be, those should be thought of
as relatively minor injuries when compared to the long-term catastrophic damage
sure to be caused by the collapse of global efforts to slow the pace of global
warming.
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RESISTANCE, HOPE, CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE, REPARATIONS, PUNISHMENT
Hopeful Books for Kids
Jason Plautz, “Once Upon a Planet.” Mother
Jones (May-June 2022). The books were “inspired by Greta
Thunberg” and are concerned with the mental health of children in a warming
world.
Lily Williams. If Animals Disappeared. “picture-book series.”
Carole Lindstrom. We Are Water Protectors. “2020 picture book…inspired by Dakota Access
Pipeline protests.”
Sita Brahmachari. Where the River Runs Gold. “’Dystopian’ 2019 middle-grade novel.”
Leslie Davenport. All the Feelings Under the Sun. A “climate anxiety book” for kids of
different ages.
Katherine Applegate.
Willowdeen. A pessimistic fantasy fiction?
Jeremy Wortzel and Lena Champlin. Coco’s
Fire. Written with psychiatrists for
kids in a scary world. Follows a
six-step “Climate Talk.”
(Arranged roughly accord. to age level. –Dick)
Suicide: The Political and Legal Implications of
Creating Endless Mass Death (Prison Notebooks) by Roger Hallam. Robin Boardman, Ed. Chris Hedges (Pulitzer Prize-winner) Foreword. Jan. 2026.
194.
In the age of climate collapse, telling the
truth has become a criminal act.
From a cell in Wayland Prison, Roger
Hallam—farmer, researcher, and co-founder of Just Stop Oil—delivers a searing
indictment of a legal system that punishes those who resist, while protecting
those who destroy. In July 2024, Hallam was dragged from a British courtroom
for refusing to stay silent about the climate crisis. For “conspiracy to cause
a public nuisance,” he was sentenced to five years in prison, the harshest
punishment for civil disobedience in the UK in modern British history. The
case made front-page news and drew global outcry. [He was released in 2025 after
appeal. D]
Suicide is part memoir, part political reckoning.
Drawing on Hallam’s award-winning research and experience representing himself
in four Crown Court trials, it lays bare the moral and legal failures of a
society sleepwalking into catastrophe. From climate science and the right
of necessity, to the collapse of democratic norms and the illusions of secular
reason, this is a radical call to rethink justice, truth, and duty in the face
of extinction.
“These protestors are not criminals—they are
messengers.” — Open Letter signed by
1,200+ public figures, incl. Rowan Williams, Brian Eno, Annie Lennox, Sir David
King, Tilda Swinton & Philip Pullman
Praise “Brilliant: wise, profound and persuasive.” — George Monbiot
“An instruction manual for ripping through the corruption.” — Paul Mason
"Mr. Roger Hallam is the charismatic
voice and face of Britain’s climate crisis movement. His devotion to this cause
has been like a burning cigarette carelessly tossed from a car window. It
ignited a grass fire that became a brush fire and then a forest fire in the
minds of Britain’s youth and socially aware grownups. Roger chose the succinct
title “Suicide” for his account of the M25 trial that led to the imprisonment
of all who took part in an act of civil disobedience. This book echoes
Martin Luther King Jr’s “Letter from the Birmingham Jail”, Thoreau’s “Civil
Disobedience”, and Gandhi’s Satya Graha movement. He borrows from the irony
of Socrates’ trial in “The Apology” and avoids the self-pity of Oscar Wilde’s
“De Profundis”. The book “Suicide” is an erudite, well researched, reasoned
defense of the movement that was on trial for the M25 disruption. Mr. Hallam
calls upon some of the most celebrated names in British intellectual history to
support his arguments for leniency toward protesters trying to forestall the
extinction of all life everywhere. The harshness of Mr. Hallam’s sentence
was only slightly mitigated by its curtailment as the government sought to
remedy the outrageous verdict.
This short book of 150 pages is finding its way into the hands of students in
universities and public schools. Thus the M25 case and its resolution will
influence trials for climate crisis protests in coming years. Yet Mr. Hallam
minds us of a disconcerting likelihood. If it takes twenty five years for a new
generation of judges, members of Parliament, teachers, professors, and
technocrats to replace the present generation, the year will be 2050 and
more irreversible harm shall have been done. Mr.Hallam’s book strikes a note of
true urgency without giving way to despair." - Jim McKee, Austin,
USA.
REPARATIONS
Naveena Sadasivam & Te Aniwaniwa Paterson. “In a rare show of global unity, countries adopt
landmark climate ruling.” Grist (May 22, 2026).
Despite U.S. opposition, an overwhelming
majority of nations agreed that failing to address climate change could be
grounds to seek reparations.
About six years ago, law students at the
University of the South Pacific convinced the government of the small island
nation of Vanuatu to take the harms wrought by climate change all the way to
the International Court of Justice, the world’s highest legal authority.
Vanuatu, along with the students, waged a campaign to convince the
court that climate
change was a human rights issue and that countries have a legal duty to protect
the planet for future generations. In 2025, the court sided with them
unanimously. In a legally nonbinding advisory opinion, it ruled that the
failure of countries to tackle climate change is a “wrongful act” and that
other nations harmed by a warming planet may seek reparations.
Now, the effort has notched another win. On
Wednesday, an overwhelming majority of countries in the United Nations voted
to adopt a resolution backing the court’s ruling. The historic decision signals the political
support behind the court’s finding that countries have a legal responsibility
to address climate change, reduce its impact, and offer reparations to those it
has harmed. More than 140 countries voted in favor of the resolution.
Just eight — including the United States, Iran, Israel, Saudi
Arabia, and Russia — voted against (28 countries abstained from the
vote).
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touch.
“This must be a turning point in
accountability for damaging the climate,” said Vishal Prasad, director of the
Pacific Islands Students Fighting Climate Change and one of the law students
who campaigned to take the case to the International Court of Justice, or ICJ.
“The journey of this idea from classrooms in the Pacific to The Hague and the
United Nations gives us continued hope that when people organize, the world can
be moved to act.”
The near-unanimous decision is a strong signal
that multilateral cooperation on climate change has not completely unraveled.
Over the past year, global unity on reducing greenhouse gas emissions has
proven shaky. After Donald Trump’s administration announced it would withdraw
from the Paris Agreement, the United States has actively opposed climate
action. Last year, it
derailed countries that were close to setting a carbon tax on the shipping
industry, which is responsible for about 3 percent of the world’s carbon
emissions. A deal to regulate the industry’s emissions now seems
uncertain. The U.S. has also helped kill a cap on
plastics production and
berated the International Energy Agency into projecting future energy demand
under a scenario that climate action will stall out.
“The unity and clarity expressed by the vote
was striking,” said Nikki Reisch, director of the Center for International
Environmental Law’s climate and energy program. Reisch said the resolution puts
“political weight behind legal norms” and will help translate the international
court’s conclusions into practical action. “It will become another pillar and
proof of political backing for action and accountability.”
The resolution reiterates the International Court of
Justice’s core findings and calls on countries to implement measures to keep
global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) while
transitioning away from fossil fuels. It also affirms that nations must fulfill
their climate obligations and that those countries harmed by others’ inaction
are entitled to seek redress. Finally, the resolution calls on the United
Nations’ secretary-general to submit a report next year on ways to comply with
the international court’s findings. The resolution, like most U.N. resolutions,
is not legally binding; rather, it’s intended to signal political priorities or
views. . . . [I omitted summary of US harms to climate and opposition to the
Resolution. –D]
The Indigenous News Alliance contributed
reporting to this story.
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George Monbiot. “ Days of Rage.” -
monbiot.com (forwarded by Robert
McAfee. ARK CCL julY 24, 2022) to shelley, Jan, Fay, me. 
July 19, 2022 To: robertjmca1@gmail.com
Days of Rage -
monbiot.com Posted: 19 Jul 2022 08:34 AM PDT
“System change is – and has always been – our
only realistic means of defending the living planet” by George Monbiot. The
Guardian (19th July 2022).
Can we talk about it
now? I mean the subject most of the media and most of the political class has
been avoiding for so long. You know, the only subject that ultimately counts –
the survival of life on Earth. Everyone knows, however carefully they avoid the
topic, that, beside it, all the topics filling the front pages and obsessing
the pundits are dust. Even the Times editors still publishing columns denying climate science know it. Even the candidates for
the Tory leadership, ignoring or downplaying the issue, know it. Never has a silence been so loud or so resonant.
This is not a passive
silence. It is an active silence, a fierce commitment to distraction and
irrelevance in the face of an existential crisis. It is a void assiduously
filled with trivia and amusement, gossip and spectacle. Talk about anything,
but not about this. But while the people who dominate the means of
communication frantically avoid the subject, the planet speaks, in a roar
becoming impossible to ignore. These days of atmospheric rage, these heatshocks and wildfires ignore the angry shushing and burst rudely
into our silent retreat.
We have seen nothing
yet. The dangerous heat England is suffering at the moment is already becoming normal in southern Europe, and would be counted among the cooler
days during hot periods in parts of the Middle East, Africa and South Asia, where heat is becoming a regular threat to life. It
cannot now be long, unless immediate and comprehensive measures are taken,
before these days of rage become the norm even in our once-temperate climatic zone.
The same formula applies
to every harm humans do to each other: what cannot be discussed cannot be
addressed. Our failure to prevent catastrophic global heating arises above all
from the conspiracy of silence that dominates public life, the same conspiracy of silence that has, at one
time or another, surrounded every variety of abuse and exploitation.
We do not deserve this.
The billionaire press and the
politicians it promotes may deserve each other, but none of us deserves
either group. They are constructing a world between them in which we have not
elected to live, in which we may not be able to live. On this issue, as on so
many, the people tend to be far ahead of those who claim to represent us. But
those politicians and media barons deploy every imaginable wile and ruse
to prevent decisive action from being taken.
They do so on behalf of
the fossil fuel industry, animal farming, finance, construction firms, car
manufacturers and airline companies, but also on behalf of something bigger
than any of those interests: the power of incumbency. Those who hold power today do so by stamping out challenges,
regardless of the form they take. The demand to decarbonise our economies is
not just a threat to carbon-intensive industry; it is a threat to the world
order that permits powerful men to dominate us. To give ground to climate
campaigners is to surrender power.
Over the past few years,
I’ve begun to see that mainstream environmental movements have made a terrible
mistake. The theory of change pursued by most established green groups is
entirely wrong. Though seldom openly articulated, it governs their strategy. It
goes something like this. There is too little time and the ask is too big to
try to change the system. People aren’t ready for it. We don’t want to scare
away our members or provoke a fight with the government. So the only realistic
approach is incrementalism. We will campaign, issue by issue, sector by
sector, for gradual improvements. After years of persistence, the small asks
will add up to the comprehensive change we seek and deliver the world we want.
But while they have been
playing patience, power has been playing
poker. The radical right insurgency has swept all before it, crushing
the administrative state, destroying public protections, capturing the courts, the electoral system and the infrastructure of government, shutting down
the right to protest and the right to live. While we persuaded ourselves that there is no time for system
change, they proved us wrong by changing everything.
The problem was never
that system change is too big an ask
or takes too long. The problem is that incrementalism
is too small an ask. Not just too small to drive transformation; not just too
small to stop the tidal wave of revolutionary change rolling in from the
opposite direction; but also too small to break the conspiracy of silence. Only
a demand for system change, directly confronting the power driving us to
planetary destruction, has the potential to match the scale of the problem and
to inspire and mobilise the millions
of people required to generate effective action.
All this time, environmentalists have been telling
people we face an unprecedented, existential crisis, while simultaneously
asking them to recycle their bottle tops and change their drinking straws.
Green groups have treated their members like idiots and, I suspect, somewhere
deep down, the members know it. Their timidity, their reluctance to say
what they really want, their mistaken belief that people aren’t ready to hear
anything more challenging than this micro-consumerist bollocks carries a significant share of the blame
for global failure.
There was never time for
incrementalism. Far from being a
shortcut to the change we want to see, it is a morass in which ambition sinks. System change, as the right has proved,
is, and has always been, the only fast and effective means of transformation.
Some of us know what
we want: private sufficiency, public luxury; doughnut economics; participatory democracy and an ecological civilisation. None of these are bigger asks than those the
billionaire press has made and largely achieved: the neoliberal revolution that has swept away effective governance, effective taxation
of the rich, effective restraints on the power of business and oligarchs and,
increasingly, effective democracy.
So let’s break our own
silence. Let’s stop lying to ourselves and others by pretending that small
measures deliver major change. Let’s abandon the timidity and tokenism. Let’s
stop bringing buckets of water when only fire engines will do. Let’s build our
campaign for systemic change towards the critical 25% threshold of public
acceptance, beyond which, a
range of scientific
studies suggests, social tipping happens.
I
feel clearer about what effective political action looks like than I have ever
been. But a major question remains. Given that we have left it so late, can we
reach the social tipping point before we hit the environmental tipping point? www.monbiot.comGoogle, 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway, Mountain
View, CA 94043, United States
SUVA, Fiji. “Islands declare climate crisis.” Arkansas Democrat-Gazette (16 Jul 2022). [Pacific Islands Forum leaders struggle to
agree and adhere to climate goals. Kiribati
has withdrawn from the Pacific Islands Forum.
China is seen as extending its influence by its new agreement with Solomon
Islands. Concerns over the new
Australian government’s commitment to climate containment is discussed. Turmoil and fears throughout. –D]
“Socialism
and Ecological Survival: An Introduction.”
John Bellamy Foster (July 5, 2022).
Time is running out for humanity to avoid a catastrophic
planetary tipping point. Widespread mass mobilizations of populations worldwide
must fight to bring about revolutionary societal changes and dismantle
neoliberal monopoly capitalism, with its reliance on extractive exploitation of
our planet’s resources and communities. | more…
“Extinction Rebellion Activists Glue
Themselves To European Commission HQ” By
Louise Guillot, Politico. Popular Resistance.org
(6-21-22). A group of 10 Extinction
Rebellion climate activists on Monday glued themselves to the entrance doors of
the European Commission's Berlaymont building in Brussels. Around 25 activists
in total, coming from Germany, Austria, France, the Netherlands and Italy among
others, were present to call on the EU to do more against environmental damage
and to criminalize ecocide — the deliberate and systematic
destruction of ecosystems. "We want [EU countries] to criminalize ecocide
and the Commission could start doing that," said Amelie, a member of
Extinction Rebellion Berlin, while her... -more-
KPBS https://www.kpbs.org › news › arts-culture
Oct 22, 2020 — “Can We Cool The Planet?” takes a fresh approach to covering the climate change crisis
by investigating new technologies that may help delay
Is this Resistance, technologies that will make a few people
rich? The film surveys several just
begun, proposed, or imagined geo-tech solutions to the warming crisis; e.g.,
sequestering CO2 underground. Film as
whole and conclusion are upbeat, but there are no magic bullets: many of the solutions proposed will be
necessary together to stop FF. Caution:
The presentations seemed unscientific, appealing to credulity, and the arch-capitalist
David H. Koch being the primary
sponsor didn’t give me more confidence. Only a few of these “solutions” could make a
bunch of millionaires in even the planning stage. D
END CLIMATE EMERGENCY ANTHOLOGY #4
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