Climate Crisis Archives

4Jul

By Shoah - The Palestinian HolocaustNo Comments

Climate Crisis

Hot Times in the Caldera

BY KATIE FITE Critical Minerals Propaganda In early summer, Vale BLM held a Resource Advisory Council meeting in McDermitt, ground zero for the critical minerals rush on public lands. Lithium driller Jindalee HiTech got to talk about the company’s horrifying new exploration drilling proposal for 267 more drill holes, wastewater sumps, and 30 miles of new “temporary” roads. The project would tear rip apart irreplaceable Sage-grouse Focal habitat, as a prelude to open pit strip mining for lower grade lithium. The BLM geologist showed a video, How Critical Minerals are Vital to the Climate Fight, that had appeared on ABC news. One narrator, Reed Blakemore, was from the Atlantic Council think tank known for never seeing a War or US-backed coup it wouldn...

Nuclear Power Has Long Stifled Renewables, Now It’s Time for It to Go Extinct

27Jun

By Shoah - The Palestinian HolocaustNo Comments

Climate Crisis

Nuclear Power Has Long Stifled Renewables, Now It’s Time for It to Go Extinct

BY LINDA PENTZ GUNTER The green atom. Image: JSC and AI Art Generator. We needn’t have had Fukushima at all, now 12 years old and still emitting radiation, still not “cleaned up”, still responsible for forbidden zones where no one can live, play, work, grow crops. We needn’t have had Chornobyl either, or Three Mile Island, or Church Rock. We needn’t have almost lost Detroit. We could have avoided climate change as well. Not just by responding promptly to the early recognition of the damage fossil fuels were doing. But also by heeding one sensible plan that, if it had been acted upon, would have removed the nuclear power elephant from the energy solutions room and possibly also saved us from plunging into the climate catastrophe abyss in which we now find ourselves. Ri...

Catching Up To Germany, The “Climate Leader”

14Jun

By Shoah - The Palestinian HolocaustNo Comments

Climate Crisis, Germany

Catching Up To Germany, The “Climate Leader”

Posted by: John Phoenix By Francis Menton | Manhattan Contrarian Here in New York, our leaders fancy us to be the “climate leader.” After all, our legislature has enacted the “Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act” of 2019, setting out the most aggressive mandatory emissions-reduction targets of all the U.S. states. Allegedly, 70% of our electricity will come from “renewables” by 2030. Nobody can top us! But can we really catch up to Germany? Germany was in the “climate leadership” game before almost anybody else had even heard of it. It was all the way back in 1990 that Germany adopted its first emissions-reduction target — 25 to 30 percent fewer CO₂ emissions by 2005, compared to 1987 levels. In 2000, while New York was still in its climate diaper...

Environmentalists Owe an Enormous Debt to Julian Assange

12Jun

By Shoah - The Palestinian HolocaustNo Comments

Climate Crisis, Politics

Environmentalists Owe an Enormous Debt to Julian Assange

BY MITCHEL COHEN Photograph Source: Ivan Radic – CC BY 2.0 Environmentalists throughout the world owe an enormous debt of gratitude to political prisoner Julian Assange, the founder and publisher of Wikileaks — and most of them don’t know it. It wasn’t only secret recordings pertaining to war and crimes-against-humanity that Wikileaks published, based on the heroic work of Chelsea Manning who downloaded thousands of secret US military files. A slew of cables Assange published revealed massive U.S. government attempts on behalf of Monsanto to coerce governments to allow foreign corporate land ownership, and with it genetically engineered agriculture throughout the world, and to squelch opposition to GMOs, breaking down existing laws prohibiting the genetic engineerin...

12Jun

By Shoah - The Palestinian HolocaustNo Comments

Climate Crisis

Poisoning the Planet

BY LINDA PENTZ GUNTER Washed up plastics pollution, Accra, Ghana. Photo: Muntaka Chasant/Wikimedia Commons. Much has been made — and rightly so — about the potential impact on human health and the Japanese fishing industry if Japan moves forward with its proposal to dump 1.2 million cubic meters — that’s 1.3 million tons —of radioactively contaminated water into the Pacific Ocean from the destroyed Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant site. Unfortunately, this looks likely to happen sometime this month or next despite the worldwide outcry. But when I say “happen”, that rather suggests a one-off dump. Instead, the discharge of these liquid nuclear wastes could go on for at least 17 years according to the Atomic Energy Society of Japan, but likely longer as...

Any Antidote to Climate Anxiety Involves Organizing

11Jun

By Shoah - The Palestinian HolocaustNo Comments

Climate Crisis

Any Antidote to Climate Anxiety Involves Organizing

BY PAUL MESSERSMITH-GLAVIN The orange haze of wildfire smoke in New York City in June 2023. (Wikimedia/Anthony Quintano) I watch the bright orange glow of the approaching fires from our southern window. The “get ready to evacuate” line is moving ever closer, stalling out only a mile away. My partner, eight-year-old child and I roll up towels, placing them at the base of our front door to prevent toxic wildfire smoke further seeping in. We don’t have air purifiers. We are scared. After several days, feeling claustrophobic and wanting to play, my child and I decide to venture out. Donning Portland-appropriate respirators and goggles — necessitated by the police force’s habit that year of gassing entire neighborhoods in response to a popular uprising insisting Black lives m...

Scientists Pursue Climate Activism Despite Violent Threats

10Jun

By Shoah - The Palestinian HolocaustNo Comments

Climate Crisis

Scientists Pursue Climate Activism Despite Violent Threats

BY STAN COX Riverside Fire approaching Estacada in 2020. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair. Last month, 29 of the world’s prominent scientists published a paper in the journal Science Advances showing conclusively that given the worsening of climate change, biodiversity loss, and five other global emergencies generated by industrial society, “Earth is now well outside of the safe operating space for humanity.” It has been known for years that we are in big trouble, but this paper put an exclamation point on the massive trove of research showing that our species’ abuse of the Earth is causing ecological breakdown. And the world’s rich nations pretend nevertheless that everything is just fine. I spent the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic writing a book&n...

The Climate Cult Reacts As Its Political Position Begins To Slip

3Jun

By Shoah - The Palestinian HolocaustNo Comments

Climate Crisis

The Climate Cult Reacts As Its Political Position Begins To Slip

By Francis Menton | Manhattan Contrarian For two decades and more, the political position of the climate alarm cult in the U.S. and Europe has only seemed to strengthen with time. In the U.S., the Obama and Biden Administrations have both pushed huge regulatory initiatives to restrict use of fossil fuels (with only some modest roll-backs during Trump’s four years); some of the most sweeping restrictions got pushed through just a week ago. Meanwhile, blue states like California and New York have enacted ever-more-extreme restrictions by statute. In Europe, there has been a near all-party political consensus in favor of the “net zero” agenda, notably including even the mainstream conservative parties in the largest countries like the UK and Germany. I have long said that s...

Labor and Green Colonialism in the Global South

21May

By Shoah - The Palestinian HolocaustNo Comments

Climate Crisis

Labor and Green Colonialism in the Global South

BY JOHN FEFFER Photograph Source: Stephen Yang / The Solutions Project – CC BY 2.0 Making a transition away from fossil fuels is going to require a lot of work. But there’s a real concern that it will also require a lot fewer workers. All of the workers in fossil fuel industries, for instance, are acutely aware that their jobs are at risk, if not immediately then at some point in the future. Along with automation, the energy transition also threatens to reduce the ranks of those in sectors dependent on fossil fuel, like plastics, steel, and petrochemicals. And unions are particularly concerned that unionized jobs in these sectors will be replaced with lower-paid non-union positions if they aren’t outsourced to lower-wage countries altogether. In 2023, employment ...

The Struggle for Environmental Justice in Africa

14May

By Shoah - The Palestinian HolocaustNo Comments

Africa, Climate Crisis

The Struggle for Environmental Justice in Africa

The framework of our civilization is premised on the destruction of the planet.By Nnimmo BasseyThe struggle for environmental justice in Africa is complex and broad. It is the continuation of the fight for the liberation of the continent and for socio-ecological transformation. It is a fact that the environment is our life: The soil, rivers, and air are not inanimate or lifeless entities. We are rooted and anchored in our environment. Our roots are sunk into our environment and that is where our nourishment comes from. We do not see the Earth and her bountiful gifts as items that must be exploited, transformed, consumed, or wasted. The understanding of the Earth as a living entity and not a dead thing warns that rapacious exploitation that disrupts her regenerative powers are acts of ...