It’s been devastating, even if no one’s paying attention.

Three months of fighting in Sudan between the army and a paramilitary group called the Rapid Support Force (RSF) has left at least 3,000 people dead and wounded at least 6,000 more. Over two million people have been displaced within the country, while another 700,000 have fled to neighboring nations. According to the World Health Organization, two-thirds of the health facilities in Khartoum, the capital, and other combat zones are now out of service, so the numbers of dead and injured are believed to be far higher than recorded, and bodies have been rotting for days in the streets of the capital, as well as in the towns and villages of the Darfur region.

Almost all foreign nationals, including diplomats and embassy staff, are long gone and so, according to Al Jazeera, hundreds or thousands of Sudanese who had visa applications pending have instead found themselves marooned in the crossfire with their passports locked away inside now-abandoned embassies. In the Darfur region, according to non-Arab tribal leaders, the RSF and local Arab militias have been carrying out mass killings, raping women and girls, and looting and burning homes and hospitals. Earlier this month, United Nations humanitarian chief Martin Griffiths told the Associated Press, “If I were Sudanese, I’d find it hard to imagine that this isn’t a civil war… of the most brutal kind.”

According to the United Nations, half the country’s population, a record 25 million people, is now in need of humanitarian aid. And worse yet, half of those are children, many of whom were in dire need even before this war broke out. Tragically, global warming will only compound their misery. Among 185 nations ranked by the Notre Dame Global Adaptation Initiative, Sudan is considered the sixth most susceptible to harm from climate change.

Heat waves, drought, and flooding are projected to become ever more frequent and intense as the atmosphere above Sudan warms further. This summer war and weather have been converging in strikingly deadly ways. With cloudless skies, water and electricity services largely knocked out, and daily temperature highs in the capital recently ranging from 109° to 111° Fahrenheit, the misery is only intensifying. Meanwhile, in the Darfur region and across the border in eastern Chad, the season of torrential rains is about to begin. The country director for Concern Worldwide in Chad says that many of the quarter-million Sudanese refugees there “are living in makeshift tents made from sticks and any material they can find, which means they are not protected from the heavy rains. The situation is catastrophic.”

This Conflict Will Not Be Televised

Among the refugees from this war are some of our own relatives and in-laws, part of an extended Indian-Sudanese family who have lived in Khartoum all their lives. In May, they fled the escalating violence, some via a perilous, hair-raising 500-mile road trip across the Nubian Desert to Port Sudan. There, they caught a ship across the Red Sea to Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. Their goal, as they informed us in June through voice messages, was Egypt — so far, the most common destination for Sudanese refugees over the past three months. And mind you, desperate as they may be, our relatives are in a far less perilous situation than people fleeing the Darfur region for Chad. Still, they are leaving behind a life built up over decades, without knowing if they will ever be able to return to Khartoum.

And here — for us — is a disturbing reality. We’ve had to do a lot of searching to find significant information in the U.S. major media about the struggle in Sudan, no less the plight of its refugees — though recently there were finally substantive reports at NPR and in the Washington Post. Still, the contrast with 16 months of breathless, daily, top-of-the-hour reporting on the Ukraine war and the millions of people it’s displaced has been striking indeed.

There’s a major difference as well between Washington’s responses to each of those wars. Before the fighting broke out in Sudan, the country had about 30% fewer people living in need of humanitarian assistance than Ukraine. Now, it has almost 50% more than Ukraine. Given those relative needs, U.S. humanitarian aid to Sudan in Fiscal Year 2023 ($536 million) was not all that skimpy compared with the humanitarian aid going to Ukraine ($605 million). — not, at least, until you add in the $49 billion in military aid Washington has been sending to Kyiv — 80 times the civilian aid, to which has only recently been added fundamentally anti-humanitarian cluster bombs. In the past year, in other words, Ukraine got 13% more humanitarian aid than Sudan but 93 times more total aid when you count war assistance.

And the U.S. is not alone. The entire world is lagging badly in its response to the humanitarian tragedy in Sudan. William Carter of the Norwegian Refugee Council recently lamented, “I haven’t seen it treated with urgency. It’s not ignorance; it’s a case of apathy.” Admittedly, conditions in Sudan and Chad make aid delivery difficult now, but Western powers, Carter pointed out, are simply “not willing to stick their necks out.”

Sidelining Civilians, Coddling Generals

Washington has assisted Ukraine massively since the war there began. In contrast, its actions in the months leading up to Sudan’s current conflict were not only ineffective but may even have made war more likely.

Some background: Four years ago, a popular uprising overthrew the country’s longtime autocratic president, Omar al-Bashir. A Sovereignty Council was formed to negotiate a transition to democracy. Susan Page, who served as the first U.S. ambassador to the Republic of South Sudan, has written that the council’s designation as a “civilian-led transitional government” was “always a bit of a fig leaf,” given that its membership included more military officials than civilians. The transition was even led by military officials, including the two men who command the forces now locked in battle, Sudanese army chief General Abdel-Fattah Burhan and General Mohamed Hamdan, who leads the RSF paramilitary group.

After two years of obstructing the work of the Sovereignty Council, that odd duo joined forces in an October 2021 coup and took control of Sudan. The negotiations over a democratic transition, mediated by the United States, Great Britain, the United Arab Emirates, and Saudi Arabia nonetheless went on for another 18 months, while those generals continued to stonewall. According to Democratic Senator Chris Coons of Delaware, the generals even stooped to outright extortion, hinting that if they didn’t get full backing from the West, they’d create a fresh migration crisis in Europe by kicking out hundreds of thousands of their fellow Sudanese and sending them northward. Still, last February, with military-civilian negotiations bogged down, Coons remained hopeful, writing:

The Sudanese people… are not backing down in the defense of their political gains. Even in the face of persistent killings, sexual violence, and arrests by the regime, a massive, nationwide pro-democracy movement has for months maintained nonviolent street protests. The determination these thousands of people have shown as they risk their lives against heavily armed security forces should serve as a reminder the world over of how precious democracy truly is.

Coons urged the Biden administration to throw its weight behind the pro-democracy movement, with sanctions that would hit the military leaders hard while sparing civil society: “A modern, comprehensive set of sanctions on the coup leaders and their networks,” he wrote, “will disrupt the military’s revenue streams and their grip on power, creating an opening for the nation’s nascent democracy movement to grow.” As is now painfully obvious, Biden didn’t take Coons’s advice and, six weeks later, the shooting started.

In an article published soon after the outbreak of fighting, Edward Wong and three colleagues at the New York Times reported that some of the people who played a part in the negotiations told them “the Biden administration, rather than empowering civilian leaders, prioritized working with the two rival generals,” even after they’d seized power in that coup. A high-level government adviser assured the Times that senior American diplomats “made the mistake of coddling the generals, accepting their irrational demands, and treating them as natural political actors. This fed their lust for power and their illusion of legitimacy.”

“A Critical Puzzle Piece”

The broad lack of concern for the Sudanese people in the U.S. and other rich countries also contrasts sharply with the intense geopolitical interest in Sudan of certain regional powers. Mohammad Salami of the International Institute for Global Strategic Analysis observes that Washington’s Persian Gulf allies have big plans for Sudan, thanks to its strategically important Red Sea coastline, its wealth in mineral resources, and its potential for tourism and agricultural production. (We can’t help wondering if they’re taking into account the degree to which its farming may, in the future, be clobbered by climate change.) Looking ahead, Salami writes, “The United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia have long-term plans for Africa, and for Sudan as their gateway to it.”

Until the recent chaos began, Sudan had also been a gateway for refugees from Asia, the Middle East, and other parts of Africa. Writing less than three weeks into the Sudan conflict, MSNBC columnist Nayyera Haq observed that many of the people then fleeing the country were, in fact, repeat refugees, having fled previous conflicts in Syria, Yemen, and Myanmar, among other places. As Western diplomats and embassy staff across Khartoum rushed for the exits (echoes of Kabul and Kandahar two summers ago!), Haq concluded:

Sudan, once considered a far-off nation, is now a critical puzzle piece in this era of great power competition among global economies. As boundaries continue to blur because of technology and climate change, forced migration is more common: millions flee north from Latin America to the U.S., from Syria to Europe, and now across East Africa. But the same countries eager to extract oil and minerals from Africa are quick to shut down, only watching out for their own as Sudan devolves into chaos.

Sudan is indeed rich in mineral resources that span the alphabet: aluminum, chromium, cobalt, iron, manganese, nickel, rare earths, silver, and zinc. All of those are important to the world’s renewable energy and battery industries. But Sudan’s biggest source of wealth lies in its gold deposits. The gold-mining industry is largely owned by a Russian-Sudanese joint venture headquartered in the northeast of the country. The wealth it’s generated hasn’t benefited the Sudanese people. Before the recent chaos, in fact, it was being split by the military regime, the Russian government, and none other than the infamous warlord Yevgeny Prigozhin’s Wagner Group, which had been managing the joint venture’s gold-mining and processing operations since 2017. And Wagner being Wagner, they also have now taken sides in Sudan’s war, according to the U.S. Treasury Department, by providing surface-to-air missiles to the RSF paramilitary forces.

Unworthy Victims

The paucity of attention paid to civilian victims of the conflict in Sudan compared to Ukrainian civilians brings to mind the contrast between “worthy” and “unworthy” victims drawn by Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky in their 1988 book Manufacturing Consent. They contrasted the extensive mass-media coverage of the 1984 murder of a Polish priest, Jerzy Popieluszko, during the Cold War with the lack of the same when it came to more than two dozen priests and other religious people slaughtered by governments and death squads in El Salvador and Guatemala in those years., Having been murdered by agents of a Communist government. Popieluszko was regarded as worthy of attention in the American media of the time, while his counterparts slaughtered by Central American governments allied with the U.S. weren’t. In a similar fashion, white Europeans now being killed, wounded, or rendered homeless by Russian troops are victims worthy of media attention, while Sudanese facing similar fates aren’t.

To be fair, a previous horrific conflict that gripped Sudan’s Darfur region from 2003 to 2008 did receive significant coverage in the Western media thanks to a convergence of unusual circumstances. The chief among them: the massive attention it received from celebrities of the time, including Angelina Jolie, George Clooney, Lady Gaga, and Mia Farrow. Sudan’s media appeal of 15 years ago was, however, an exception to the rules of this world of ours. Today, such celebrities and the media seem to be gripped by a kind of compassion fatigue.

Of course, like most Americans, we were paying no attention whatsoever to developments in Sudan before the fighting started — and before we learned that our own kinfolk were in danger. Now, what choice do we have but to keep up with the latest developments?

For weeks, our relatives were in limbo, trying to reach Egypt. Some were already in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, but stuck there. Others had made it to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. We were by then in touch and they acknowledged that they were “better off than most,” meaning they weren’t being pinned down in a deadly 110° war zone without passports, electricity, or running water, nor were they, like so many Sudanese, trapped in squalid refugee camps.

Only the other day, we finally learned that they had arrived safely in Egypt. Back in Khartoum they’d operated a small school, and they’re now hoping, if they can work their way through Cairo’s bureaucracy, that, as one of them put it, “Next year, Inshallah, we can start our school here, if we are still here and still war-driven.” Their futures have indeed been driven by war into a hard-to-imagine future. As one put it, “Nothing seems to be settling down in Sudan anytime soon.”

Sadly, their assessment seems all too accurate. Since April, at least 10 ceasefires between the army and that paramilitary outfit have broken down more or less instantly. In mid-July, leaders of the six countries bordering Sudan met, in the impressive-sounding words of Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sissi, to formulate “an executive action plan to reach a comprehensive solution to the Sudanese crisis.”

Not so surprisingly, though, no such plan has yet emerged. Given its resources and its geographical centrality, an assortment of richer, stronger countries all want a piece of Sudan, but none of those plans include the war’s victims. To make matters worse, in this war (as in others to come), climate disruption will be a “threat multiplier.” Worse yet, as long as our media fails to see the Sudanese conflict or, more importantly, the Sudanese people as worthy of extensive reporting, the realities of the ongoing war there will continue to lie somewhere beyond the horizon.

Stan Cox, Every Kind of Conflict, Everywhere, All at Once?

It hardly matters whether you’re talking about the Canadian wildfires that continue to burn in an out-of-control fashion or the 120-degree temperatures in… no, not India! — Texas!! Heat waves, megadroughts, ever more violent storms, ever fiercer fires, ever more staggering floods, you name it and we’re either already experiencing it or likely to do so in the years to come. In short, we’re living in — and no, for once I’m not thinking of Donald Trump — an ever more extreme world. And worse yet — okay, okay, I apologize but I just can’t help myself — Trump, DeSantis, and most of the rest of that crew are ready to deny that any of it is actually happening. If one of them were to take power in 2024 (and don’t for a second think it couldn’t happen!), it might well ensure that our children and grandchildren will all too literally find themselves in a hell on earth.

Yes, once upon a time, the fires of hell were left for the afterlife (ask Dante!), but no longer, it seems. And it’s not just in Canada. In recent years, ever-fiercer fires have been setting the worst sorts of records in this country, too. Out-of-control flames have been turning even people in the United States, even people I know, into climate refugees. And North America is anything but alone. Europe set fire records last summer, while record heat waves from North Africa to China should remind us that we are, in some sense, on a planet Dante might well have recognized.

Given all of this (and more), it seems appropriate to let TomDispatch regular Stan Cox consider the kinds of violent meltdowns (and not even the most literal versions of them) that are likely to leave us all on an increasingly broken and costly hell of a planet. Tom

We’re Having a Violent Meltdown

The Human Costs of Global Warming — and of Our Response to It

Several times in recent weeks I’ve heard people suggest that Mother Nature has been speaking to us through that smoke endlessly drifting south from the still-raging Canadian wildfires. She’s saying that she wants the coal, oil, and gas left in the ground, but I fear her message will have little more influence on climate policy than her previous ones did. After all, we essentially hit the “snooze” button on the wakeup call from Hurricane Katrina 18 years ago; ditto the disastrous Hurricane Sandy seven years later, as well as the East Coast heat waves and West Coast wildfires of more recent years; or the startling overheating of global waters and the sea level rise that goes with it. And that’s just to begin an ever longer list of horrors.

Despite the fact that, in recent weeks, more than 100 million North Americans have been inhaling lungfuls of smoke from those Canadian wildfires, we’ll probably continue to ignore the pummeling so many here are enduring daily while carbon dioxide continues to accumulate overhead. Climate disasters are not only failing to goad governments into taking bold action but may be nudging societies toward increasing violence and cruelty.

Recently, Joel Millward-Hopkins of the University of Leeds suggested that, as the climate emergency intensifies, we may only find ourselves ever more affected by some of the indirect impacts of global warming. Those would include the “widening of socioeconomic inequalities (within and between countries), increases in migration (intra- and inter-nationally), and heightened risk of conflict (from violence and war through to hate speech and crime).” Such impacts, he suggests, will reflect a “highly inconvenient overlap with key drivers of the authoritarian populism that has proliferated in the 21st century.” Inconvenient indeed.

In other words, although weather disasters of many kinds can increase public concern about climate change, they can also help to whip up an oppressively violent sociopolitical climate that may prove ever more hostile to the very idea of reducing greenhouse-gas emissions — especially in large, affluent, high-emission societies.

Warm in the USA

Though not itself linked to climate change, the Covid-19 pandemic may have given us a preview of such developments. When it first struck, a feeling of noble national purpose, shared sacrifice, and mutual aid swept the country… for perhaps a few weeks. Then came the waves of social conflict that may, in the end, have left us even more poorly prepared for the next public health emergency. After all, the pandemic of hate that first fed on anti-vaccine and anti-mask fervor now sups from a far larger buffet of political issues including energy and climate.

Guardian columnist George Monbiot wrote recently that “culture war entrepreneurs” are casting efforts to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions as authoritarian attacks on ordinary people’s fundamental freedoms. Be ready to do battle, they say, against any move to promote heat pumps over furnaces or electric induction stoves over gas stoves or walking to the store instead of driving a big-ass truck there. In fact, he suggests, “You cannot propose even the mildest change without a hundred professionally outraged influencers leaping up to announce: ‘They’re coming for your …’’”

There are always going to be people under the influence of such influencers who will respond by jumping in their trucks for a session of “rollin’ coal” — that is, spewing toxic diesel fumes into the faces of pedestrians and cyclists. Or maybe they’ll run over a climate protester (without fear of prosecution if they’re in Florida, Iowa, or Oklahoma).

This outbreak of hostility and violence among right-wingers is occurring even though no one has actually curtailed any of their freedoms. Now, imagine the ferocity of the backlash if we could somehow manage to enact the policies that are undoubtedly most urgently needed to rein in greenhouse gases and other environmental threats: a rapid phase-out of fossil fuels and cuts in the extraction and use of material resources. The eruption would undoubtedly be far more aggressive and violent than the resistance to Covid-19 regulations.

From Pole to Equator, the Specter of Violence Looms

New climate realities are also expected to alter military conflicts among nations. One of the most troubling potential flashpoints could be the fast-melting Arctic, which, thanks to all that carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere, will soon be wide open for fishing, resource extraction, and other activities. In fact, the United States and Russia haven’t even let the Arctic Sea finish its thaw before starting to militarize it. As Devin Speak of NPR reports,

“While indigenous communities have long thrived in communion with the land there, nation states haven’t had much presence in the northern latitudes because it hasn’t been ripe for exploitation. Until sea ice began rapidly receding, oil, gas, shipping, and minerals were all under frigid lock and key. But with dwindling sea ice, tapping the region’s resources is becoming more feasible. And in conjunction with the economic opportunities, nations are eyeing big military spending. Russia has already ramped up its military presence and the United States is playing catch-up.”

As an armed standoff in cold polar waters heats up, increased attention is being paid to climate-induced mass migration as another likely conflict trigger. After all, forecasts now suggest that if greenhouse-gas emissions aren’t reduced deeply and quickly, the climatic zones safe for humans to live in will shrink dramatically. The worst of it will happen in tropical South America and Africa, the Middle East, South and Southeast Asia, parts of China, and the U.S. Sun Belt. By 2050, two to three billion people are likely to either be living in or fleeing regions that have become increasingly hostile to human existence and, by 2090, it could be three to six billion of us, or a quarter to a third of humanity. Desired destinations will include the northern United States and southern Canada, Russia, Central Asia, Korea, Japan, northern China, and northern Europe.

Consider for a moment the torrent of hate and cruelty we’ve seen in the past decade along borders between the United States and Mexico, Southeast and South Asia, and Europe and Africa. Now, imagine a 10- to 20-fold increase in long-distance migration rates and the anti-immigrant hate, violence, and even international conflict that could grip the globe in the decades to come. As a preview, just consider the fact that Republican governors in 14 states have already deployed National Guard troops to the border with Mexico for no good reason whatsoever.

In his Guardian column, Monbiot explains succinctly how climate disruption and anti-immigrant bias reinforce each other: “Round the cycle turns,” he writes. “As millions are driven from their homes by climate disasters, the extreme right exploits their misery to extend its reach. As the extreme right gains power, climate programs are shut down, heating accelerates, and more people are driven from their homes. If we don’t break this cycle soon, it will become the dominant story of our times.” It may already be the most important story, whether we realize it or not.

Climate change is likely to exacerbate violence within countries as well, simply by discombobulating us as individuals. A 2015 analysis of 57 nations found that “each degree Celsius increase in annual temperatures is associated with a nearly 6% average increase in homicides.” More recently, a review of research worldwide found that climate disruption can undermine peace by interfering with people’s mental or physiological functioning and by threatening our quality of life.

Increasingly extreme heat will also push waves of human displacement within national borders, further fanning the flames of domestic conflict. An analysis by Abrahm Lustgarten of ProPublica found that, as the Earth’s atmosphere warms, almost half of the U.S. population “will most likely experience a decline in the quality of their environment, namely more heat and less water. For 93 million of them, the changes could be particularly severe.” Expect many millions of us to move from the Sunbelt to, perhaps, the Great Lakes region and from rural to urban areas.

Mathew Hauer, a sociologist at Florida State University and a modeler of climate migration interviewed by Lustgarten, predicts some especially hard times for Atlanta. It’s the largest metropolitan area in the Southeast, a region in which, climate models suggest, droughts and wildfires will become far more common and severe as the decades pass. He projects that hundreds of thousands of local climate refugees will migrate from outlying areas into an urban area already experiencing overburdened water systems and a shaky infrastructure, along with the highest income inequality among large U.S. cities. All of that, writes Lustgarten, could make the future Atlanta “a virtual tinderbox for social conflict.”

Such conflict could well include the kind of state violence and oppression that’s increasingly unleashed on people and groups who are determined to protest against the systems that create climate chaos, environmental devastation, and injustice. Indeed, in Atlanta, that violence is already a reality. This winter and spring, city police shot and killed an activist and arrested 40 more for nonviolently occupying the city’s largest urban forest. They were part of a broad effort by people in low-income neighborhoods bordering the forest, environmental organizations, and racial-justice groups to head off the construction of a tactical-training center for the Atlanta police department that would occupy and devastate 85 of that woodland’s 150 acres. The coalition aims to prevent deforestation, preserve the quality of life for nearby neighborhoods, and halt the expenditure of $90 million on a facility that would hone the skills of cops who have demonstrated their willingness to kill unarmed Black people.

And mind you, those forest defenders were charged not with trespassing but with violating Georgia’s domestic terrorism law, which carries a sentence of at least five years in prison. When arrested, they were held in a jail that, reported Piper French of Bolts, “is notorious for squalid conditions and allegations of mistreatment by staff.” The defendants, who had committed no acts of violence, let alone “terrorism,” were denied bail on flimsy grounds, including accusations of merely “wearing black, having a jail support number scrawled on their arm, and having mud on their shoes,” according to French. And the basis for denying bail thanks to wearing black clothing and having on muddy shoes? That domestic terrorism law provides for something called “vicarious liability.” (In plain English, you could call it guilt by association.)

Nor did the repression stop there. Following a SWAT team’s recent raid on a southeast Atlanta home, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation arrested three board members of an Atlanta nonprofit that was arranging legal support for those forest defenders. They were charged with money laundering and charity fraud, stretching the already dubious concept of vicarious liability even further. Writing for Jacobin, Abe Asher notes that “the intensity of the threats protesters in Atlanta are facing is reminiscent of the risks climate defenders routinely face in the Global South, where both activists and journalists are routinely jailed and killed in their defense of land and water. Of the 401 human rights defenders killed last year, nearly half were killed defending the climate.”

Violence on the Ground (and Below It)

Some of America’s domestic policies aimed at curbing climate change could also become increasingly responsible for conflict in the Global South. If, for instance, the wealthier North continues to pursue technology-heavy “green growth” climate policies, the South could suffer yet more from the inherent violence of resource extraction. The need for increasing amounts of the minerals and metals essential to building renewable energy systems and vast fleets of electric vehicles — including lithium, cobalt, copper, nickel, and rare earths — is attracting much media attention these days.

Worse yet, in the future, they are likely to become the focus of “green resource wars.” And the mining of such ores isn’t the only extractive activity that raises the threat of conflict. To take one example, if the world’s nations pursue climate-mitigation policies that depend heavily on biofuels, the ensuing fuel plantations could end up occupying a staggering quarter to a third of the world’s croplands, almost certainly displacing some essential food crops to less productive areas. And count on this: communities throughout the global south are not going to stand back and allow such potentially wholesale losses without protest.

Selina Gallo-Cruz is an associate professor of sociology at Syracuse University. She recently published a paper, “Peace Studies and the Limits to Growth,” in which she laid out the ways the widespread violence and injustice implicit in the global North’s quest for growth — green or otherwise — has affected other communities around the world.

Citing the work of organizations like Global Witness in conflict zones worldwide, she points out that a significant part of the violence on this planet comes from the North’s “extraction of natural resources through mining or deforestation — palm oil plantations are a big one — and mega-, mega-agricultural projects,” all of which lead to “outbreaks of very violent conflict.” We must not, says Gallo-Cruz, fall for the specious argument that it would be unfair and cruel not to extract resources from impoverished countries, because the North needs such minerals and energy, while the South needs the revenue those resources can bring in. That argument is, of course, blind to the devastation of the lands, waters, and biodiversity on which such communities depend, not to mention the violent conflict that so often threatens to become a part of resource extraction.

To sum up: There has always been violent conflict. (As striking evidence, the artist Miranda Maher has documented that over the past 2,023 years of human history, only one year, 327 AD, was completely free of open armed conflict.) But we may now be preparing to top off that sorry record with climate-induced conflict globally — from open war between nation-states to abuse of migrants at borders to hate and physical assaults that happen just down the block. And efforts to curb climate change are already provoking a right-wing backlash that encourages civil conflict while bringing state violence down on climate activists. Meanwhile, corporate efforts to achieve climate-friendly growth end up inflicting the violence that accompanies resource extraction on the world’s poorest regions, creating conditions for… yes, yet more conflict.

In short, industrial civilization has by now painted the world into a perilous corner. The only way out of this mess would be for affluent societies to deeply reduce their consumption of energy and extraction of material resources, but don’t hold your breath on that one.

Priti and Stan Cox, Two Great Powers, Too Much Violence

Let me offer a small prediction: between this moment when I’m writing the introduction to Priti Gulati and Stan Cox’s new piece and the moment, a few days from now, when it’s actually posted at TomDispatch, the question isn’t whether there will be another mass shooting in America, but how many of them there will be. In a country where an estimated one of every 20 people, or some 13 million of us, owns not just a gun but an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle, it goes without saying that carnage lies ahead. After all, 2023 is already proving a record year for both mass shootings (in which at least four people other than the gunman — and yes, they are almost always men or boys — are killed or wounded) and mass killings (in which four or more people other than the gunman are slaughtered).

By early May, there had already been more than 200 mass shootings in this country and we’re on target (so to speak) for at least 60 mass killings by year’s end. (There were “only” 36 in 2022.) It’s long been the case that ours is the sole country on planet Earth where there are more privately owned guns than people. With just 4% of the world’s population, we possess something like 40% of the globe’s guns. Imagine that!

In a country where gun “control” remains essentially a fantasy, given the Trumpublican Party (and the present Supreme Court), the AR-15 has become the slaughter weapon of choice, whether of the young man who entered a Buffalo supermarket and killed 10 Black customers or of Kyle Rittenhouse, the young man who killed two Black Lives Matter protestors at a Wisconsin rally and was later invited to Mar-a-Lago by Donald Trump. And keep in mind that, while a few states have tried to impose restrictions or bans on assault rifles and President Biden has indeed supported a national ban, some Republican members of Congress now proudly sport AR-15 pins on their lapels as a sign of their commitment to the “right to bear arms” in America.

With that in mind, let TomDispatch regulars Priti Gulati and Stan Cox tell you something about where our all-too-well-armed country and Priti’s homeland, India, could both be heading, politically speaking, in this all-too-murderous moment of ours. Tom

Between a Yoga Mat and a Hard Place

The Violent Urge for Supremacy in the World’s Two Largest Democracies

Are you worried about the rising political power of violent white nationalists in America? Well, you’ve got plenty of company, including U.S. national security and counterterrorism officials. And we’re worried, too — worried enough, in fact, to feel that it’s time to take a look at the experience of India, where Hindu supremacist dogma has increasingly been enforced through violent means. While there are striking parallels between both countries, India appears to have ventured further down the road of far-right violence. Its experience could potentially offer Americans some valuable, if grim, lessons.

As a start, let’s look at two recent incidents, one in India and the other in the United States.

Laws passed in most Indian states against the killing of cattle have served as a common pretext for the violent enforcement of Hindu beliefs. Recently, for example, three men were arrested on charges of abducting and murdering Junaid and Nasir, two Muslim men transporting cattle through the northern state of Haryana. They first beat Junaid to death, then strangled Nasir. Both bodies were incinerated in a car left at the side of the road. That attack was linked to paramilitary gangs known as gao rakshaks (cow protectors) who, in these last years, have been on a rampage of violence in northern India, though similar horrors have recently been recorded further south in Maharashtra, home to India’s largest city, Mumbai.

In the United States, too, violent hatred is both on the rise and being all too perversely celebrated on the right. Within three days of being charged with involuntary manslaughter, Daniel Penny, the U.S. Marine veteran who made national news by choking to death Jordan Neely, a homeless, mentally ill Black man on a New York City subway car, raised a whopping $2.7 million from the Christian crowdfunding site GiveSendGo. Charged with manslaughter, he’s already been dubbed a “subway Superman” by Florida Republican Congressman Matt Gaetz, while his fellow Floridian, Governor Ron DeSantis, tweeted that to “stop the Left’s pro-criminal agenda” we all must “stand with Good Samaritans like Daniel Penny.”

Sadly enough, those episodes, occurring half a globe apart, are just two data points in surges of violent extremism sweeping both India and the United States. That trend first took off in India in 2014 with the election victory of Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), making him prime minister. In the United States, it hit big time with the 2016 election of Donald Trump as president. But such mayhem — and the broad approval of political violence by Hindu supremacists there and white supremacists here — has only grown in the years since.

Those incidents also illustrate one crucial difference between far-right violence in India and the United States. Whereas the surge of Hindu-supremacist violence has become a nationally organized collective effort, most American white-supremacist violence is still being committed by individuals acting alone.

In the U.S., we’ve experienced a growing outbreak of hate shootings in which the victims simply find themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time (and all too often of the wrong color), even as a longer-term trend of mass killings committed by racially motivated and ever better armed “lone wolves” rises. Notably, among those solo actors, Kyle Rittenhouse, who shot and killed two Black Lives Matter protesters in 2020, and a host of others have reaped lavish praise from leading Trumpublican politicians, including that MAGA kingpin The Donald himself. (He, in fact, invited Rittenhouse to Mar-a-Lago in 2021.) And 2023 is already on track to set a record for mass shootings, while hate crimes in general rose to more than 200 per week in 2021, the last year for which the FBI has complete data. The vast majority of those crimes were committed by unaffiliated individuals.

In India, by contrast, hate violence is often highly organized. The cattle vigilantes recently arrested in Haryana, for example, were affiliated with Bajrang Dal, the youth wing of Vishnu Hindu Parishad (the World Hindu Council), which, in turn, is an offshoot of a vast Hindu nationalist paramilitary organization, Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS).

The RSS movement was launched in 1925 with one mission: to make India (then still a British colony) a Hindu Rashtra — that is, a “Hindu Nation.” Its approach was inspired by the fascist movements of a century ago in Italy and Germany. Today, it has a membership of five to six million and holds daily meetings in more than 36,000 different locations across India. Worse yet, the ruling BJP party, with Modi at its head, is an offshoot of RSS.

In 2002, Modi was the chief minister of the state of Gujarat when horrific communal violence took almost 2,000 lives, mostly Muslim, in a political and social earthquake that helped kick off the current wave of Hindu nationalism. In 2014, on the strength of the Hindu nationalist bona fides he’d earned 12 years earlier, he became prime minister and soon all hell broke loose.

Cows and Bulls**t

In a majority of India’s states today, cow slaughter is designated a crime and put in the same category with rape, murder, or sedition. As Harsh Mander, who has organized against communal and religiously-inspired violence, explains in his book Partitions of the Heart, “The campaign today that claims to defend [the cow] has nothing to do with love of any kind.” It is instead “another highly emotive symbol to beat down India’s minorities into submission and fear.”

Laws against cattle slaughter and beef consumption lay largely dormant until 2014. Now, they are being enforced ever more violently by Hindu supremacist vigilantes. Those laws, in fact, have provided a much-needed pretext for extreme violence. As Tej Parikh noted recently in the Asia-Pacific magazine The Diplomat, “Two Muslim women were raped in Mewat [in Haryana state] in early September [2022], after their attackers had accused them of eating beef.” And to put those acts in the context of this moment, he added that “the maximum sentence for a convicted rapist in Haryana is three years less than for a cow slaughtering offense.”

As Mander has pointed out, such beef bans are a tool for subjugating Muslims, Dalits (formerly referred to pejoratively as “untouchables”), Christians, and Adivasis (Indigenous peoples) to Hindu rule. Strange as it may sound, an American analogy could be the criminalization of abortion. In one country, cattle, in the other, human fetuses are being used as right-wing implements to oppress, socially control, and reassert supremacy over significant sections of our respective populations.

As in the U.S., violence against women is rampant in India and perpetrators are often treated with remarkable leniency. Consider Sandip, Ramu, Lavkush, and Ravi, four upper-caste Hindus who, in 2020, tortured, gang-raped, and killed a 19-year-old Dalit girl in the middle of a pearl millet field in the state of Uttar Pradesh. This March, a court found Sandip alone guilty — and only of “culpable homicide not amounting to murder.” The other three men were acquitted.

In the Hindu supremacist context, the phrase ghar wapsi (which literally means “homecoming”) refers to forcibly converting people from Islam or Christianity to Hinduism. In a recent typical case, a BJP politician, the state secretary of Chhattisgarh in northeastern India, home to many low-caste Hindus and tribal peoples, coerced more than 1,100 Christians into undergoing a ghar wapsi ceremony.

Hindu supremacists regularly use confinement and violence to secure such conversions. For instance, two women have filed a complaint against priests at a yoga center in the state of Kerala where they were held captive in an effort to do so. “I was forced to do work as housemaid including cleaning and preparing dishes for 65 inmates,” one of them swore in her affidavit. A priest, she wrote, “threatened that they would kill Isaac [her Muslim husband] if I went back to him.” The other woman told the court, “People at the [yoga] center asked me to leave [her Muslim husband] Hameed. When I resisted, they slapped my face, kicked my lower abdomen and stuffed cloth in my mouth to prevent me from screaming.”

Hindu nationalists are also raising alarms over “love jihad,” a false conspiracy theory that claims Muslim men are out to charm Hindu women into wedlock, conversion, and the production of Muslim babies. A recently released propaganda film, The Kerala Story, purports to show how 32,000 women from that state were converted to Islam and recruited by Islamic State terrorists. No matter that none of that ever happened, “love jihad” rhetoric, including the portrayal of Muslim men as “deceitful, sexual monsters,” is being embraced even by white supremacists in the United States, according to Zeinab Farokhi, a professor at Toronto University.

East Meets West, West Meets Caste

Washington and New Delhi recently announced that Prime Minister Modi will be making a state visit to the U.S. in June. During that visit, notes the Indian outlet The Wire, “Modi is likely to visit New York for Yoga Day on June 21.”

Indeed, he will, for that annual yoga event was Modi’s brainchild. In 2014, he proposed that an International Day of Yoga be celebrated at the summer solstice and the U.N. General Assembly adopted a resolution to that effect. An avid yoga practitioner, Modi then wrote, “Yoga embodies unity of mind and body, thought and action… a holistic approach [that] is valuable to our health and well-being.” These days, maybe Modi should take a little more time for yoga, which might allow him to gain a more holistic understanding of the hate and cruelty now rippling through Indian society. (Substitute Donald Trump for Modi doing yoga, if you want a little grim humor right now.)

Today, there are an estimated 4.3 million South Asian-Americans living in the U.S., including people from Bangladesh, India, Nepal, and Pakistan. A report released by a caste-abolitionist group, Equality Labs, entitled “Caste in the United States,” found that even in America, “many South Asians who identify as being from the ‘lower’ castes… tend to hide their caste,” because they fear that “they and their families could be rejected from South Asian cultural and religious spaces, lose professional and social networks, or even face bullying, abuse, and violence.”

Recently, however, a few rays of light have pierced the political gloom. In February, Seattle became the first city in the U.S. to prohibit caste discrimination and (joke, joke) yoga had nothing to do with it. The ban passed because of the hard work and solidarity of local activists, along with socialist Seattle city council member Kshama Sawant who proposed it. Then, on May 11th, casteism was banished from an entire state, the nation’s largest, when the California senate passed a bill to that effect.

To add another positive note, the very next day, Modi’s BJP was trounced by the Congress Party in elections to the legislative assembly of Karnataka, a crucial state in Indian politics. When the BJP won it five years ago, it was considered a key step in that party’s rise to national dominance. Now, those of us in favor of genuine democracy and not right-wing terror in both countries can only hope that the Karnataka defeat is a harbinger of BJP’s decline (just as we hope that neither Donald Trump nor Ron DeSantis can take the White House in 2024).

But even small victories don’t come without pushback from Hindu-nationalist expatriates and RSS/BJP “intellectuals” in India, as is true with Trumpists in America. Unsurprisingly enough, they condemned the new caste measures in the U.S., declaring them “Hinduphobic” (just as white right-wingers here chant “All Lives Matter” in the context of police violence and to mock the Black Lives Matter movement). But, asks the political theorist Kancha Ilailah Shepherd, “How can the practice of caste discrimination… be tackled without local laws or institutional rules?”

Too many upper-caste Indians and white Americans think of themselves as the only ones worthy of enjoying the spoils of the earth. They want it all and are ready to get it by exploiting, not to say violating, non-upper-caste bodies in India and non-white ones in the U.S., along with cows and fetuses, using religion as a tool in both cases. The bodies of Dalits, Muslims, Christians, the people of occupied Kashmir, liberals, journalists, historians, climate and human rights activists, educators, Blacks, Indigenous people, women, LGBTQ people — all of them are fodder for the violent right-wing in both countries.

In the sludge of such destructive exceptionalism, there can be felt a sense of uncertainty, a potential for both of our societies to break down completely. Sadly, yoga and vegetarianism do not encapsulate life in India; upper-caste exceptionalism does. Similarly, “peace and love,” not to speak of democracy, hardly define life in America anymore for a growing set of Trumpublicans. For them, white exceptionalism does and, worse yet, these days it goes all too well armed with that best-selling weapon of this moment, the AR-15 semi-automatic rifle.

Honestly, there needs to be a deeper discussion of all of this before it’s too late.

Stan Cox: Spreading Hate and Bullets

Imagine a world in which one in every 20 of us, approximately 6% of the population, owns not just a gun but a military-style assault rifle. We’re talking about a weapon like the one that killed 19 schoolchildren and two teachers in Uvalde, Texas, less than a year ago, or that just recently slaughtered five people and wounded eight at a bank in Louisville, Kentucky. Mind you, close to 30% of American adults evidently own at least one gun of some sort (48% of White men). When it’s a matter of arming civilians, no other country comes close, not even Yemen, a land in a devastating civil war.

So, who could be surprised that, by mid-April of this year, there had already been at least 160 mass killings (in which four or more people die or are injured) at places ranging from that bank to a birthday party, from a private Christian elementary school to a university campus, from a farm to a Metro station in Washington? And that’s just to begin an endless and fast-growing list. In this country, you can no longer take a chance on being a Black teenager who ends up at the wrong door looking for his younger brothers or a 20-year-old White woman (who dreams of being a Marine biologist) in a car that accidentally turns into the wrong driveway.

Now, if that isn’t bad enough, imagine an ever-more-armed country in which the right-wing — those TomDispatch regular Stan Cox refers to today as ecofascists — have begun turning the green crisis on this planet into an excuse to kill anyone they dislike. It’s a scary prospect in a nation that simply can’t seem to imagine putting meaningful limits on our weaponry from hell. Tom

Not a Green Bone in Their White Bodies: How Ecofascists Are Fueling Racism and Deadly Violence

It’s not often that conservative lobbyists beat the drum for increased environmental oversight and regulation. But that’s what happened this month when the far-right Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), through its legal arm, filed a brief in federal court demanding that the Department of Homeland Security conduct an extensive environmental impact study examining, of all things, immigration policy.

In a press release, the group laid out its reasoning: “Clearly, DHS desperately wants to avoid the impossible task of explaining, in detail, why adding millions of illegal aliens to our population does not harm the environment, or why the harm it does cause is somehow ‘worth it.’”

Ostensibly green rationales for ever harsher immigration policies are hardly a new phenomenon. U.S. and European anti-immigrant movements have long used the real need for environmental protection as an excuse for demanding ever harsher treatment of immigrants. Now, with drought, flooding, storms, and other manifestations of climate disruption swelling the ranks of people seeking refuge outside their home countries, far-rightists are dialing up their evocations of nature to push ever greater cruelty toward immigrants.

The pervasive theme in such circles is that, in an already overpopulated America, more millions of dark-skinned immigrants, having supposedly wreaked ecological destruction in their own countries in the Global South, are now crossing our borders in ever larger numbers. They will, so the thinking goes, despoil this country’s environment, too — and the only way to stop them is by using ever more violent means. The extremists peddling such propaganda are coming to be known these days as “ecofascists.” Above all else, they insist, the United States must maintain white control over “our” country — you know, the lands that our ancestors stole from Native peoples who actually knew how to live in harmony with nature.

In the process, such white supremacists are, without the slightest sense of irony, increasingly adopting the language of environmentalism to push both grotesque anti-immigrant bigotry and a broader, genuinely unnerving far-right agenda.

A Crueler Shade of Green

In the past few years, ecofascism has broken into the mainstream news cycle several times, most notably in connection with a grim set of mass shootings.

Nineteen-year-old Payton Gendron, who pled guilty to murdering 10 Blacks in a Buffalo grocery store last year, explicitly called himself an ecofascist. In the manifesto he left behind, he wrote,

“For too long we have allowed the left to co-opt the environmentalist movement to serve their own needs. The left has controlled all discussion regarding environmental preservation whilst simultaneously presiding over the continued destruction of the natural environment itself through mass immigration and uncontrolled urbanization.”

Urbanization, you see, because you know what kind of people live in cities. (Wink, wink.)

Patrick Crusius, who killed 23 people in an El Paso Walmart in 2019, left behind a manifesto raising false alarms about a “Hispanic invasion.” He wrote: “The environment is getting worse by the year. Most of y’all are just too stubborn to change your lifestyle. So the next logical step is to decrease the number of people in America using resources. If we can get rid of enough people, then our way of life can become more sustainable.”

Both men drew inspiration from Brenton Tarrant, the white supremacist who, earlier in 2019, had murdered 51 people at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand. Tarrant wrote a manifesto in which he declared, “The invaders are the ones over-populating the world… Kill the invaders, kill the overpopulation and by doing so save the environment.”

Florid rhetoric notwithstanding, those mass killers did not actually have ecological sustainability at the top of their minds. They just put a green veneer on their hatred of immigrants, an increasingly familiar tactic of the racist right. Philip Santoro, in a rant for the white nationalist publication American Renaissance in 2017, slathered on an early and especially rancid coat of green:

“The Left’s ‘green politics,’ combined with support for mass immigration and opposition to nuclear power, would mean a future of overcrowding, poverty, and the displacement of whites. When the Left tackles climate change, it wants to ‘save the planet’ — but apparently for someone else’s babies. The population explosion in the global south combined with climate change and liberal attitudes towards migration are the single greatest external threat to Western civilization.”

At the Global Network on Extremism and Technology, Frederike Wegener reported that, on social media, violent extremists increasingly “disguise racist and nativist ideas behind environmental concerns to lure in young people and environmental activists,” utilizing slogans like “Love Nature, Kill Non-Whites” and “Save Bees, Plant Trees, Shoot Refugees.” Creating an overwhelming sense of imminent ecological catastrophe, he wrote, can induce nonviolent, climate-conscious citizens to make common cause with violent nativists.

Deploying bees and trees as a cover for such right-wing policies has a long history in America. The growth of the anti-immigration movement over the past half-century in particular is widely credited to a Michigan ophthalmologist named John Tanton, who, as Paloma Quiroga wrote for Wellesley College’s Environmental Synthesis and Communications blog in 2021, “viewed overpopulation and immigration as a threat to the environment and to the future of white America — views that are explicitly ecofascist. In his efforts to thwart immigration, he ended up creating a vast loose-knit network of anti-immigration groups and lobbyists, now dubbed the Tanton network.” Since the 1980s, that network has managed to sabotage all attempts to develop humane federal immigration policies.

Today, the most powerful group in the network is the Federation for American Immigration Reform, the outfit pressuring the Department of Homeland Security on the supposed environmental impact of immigrants. On its website, FAIR dwells on the evils of population growth — and by that it means only the growth of “certain” populations:

“Currently, there are 326 million people residing in the U.S., so immigration alone will be responsible for an additional 78 million people over the course of just 40 years… Growth of the population at those levels are certain to impact both the quality of life for average Americans and the sustainability of the environment. The threat of overpopulation is not to our economic health, but also to the present and future quality of life and environmental sustainability… The progress the nation has made toward increased conservation and fuel and energy efficiency will continue to be eroded…”

Connecting anti-immigrant and racist ideas via population growth to environmental degradation is nothing new. The racism of the conservation movement’s founding fathers, including John Muir and John James Audubon, have been widely discussed in recent years. In the late 1990s, Tanton, at the time still a member of the Sierra Club, pushed for that venerable environmental organization to adopt an explicitly nativist position. That proposal was voted down, but only by a very narrow margin. In 2004, anti-immigrant members again tried to seize control of the organization — and once again they failed. In recent years, in fact, the Sierra Club has forcefully renounced its former toleration of nativist sentiment within its membership and has come to actively support immigrant rights.

Ecofascist arguments serve not only as an excuse for abusing immigrants, but are also being deployed by a broader, more violent range of far-right groups and movements on both sides of the Atlantic. Environmental and anti-industrial calls to action have been a staple of the leading U.S. neo-Nazi site Daily Stormer, along with several far-right groups, including The Base, the neo-Nazi Atomwaffen Division (rebooted as the National Socialist Order), and the Pine Tree Gang. Far-right political parties in France, Austria, and Germany have similarly espoused the merging of “ecological civilization” and “ecocentric nativism.”

Equal-Opportunity Collapse?

The ecofascists’ use of green rhetoric is, of course, wholly disingenuous. But frightening as well is the way similar impulses have crept into the edges of the actual environmental movement, most of which is still identified not just with the leftward reaches of American politics, but with nonviolence. Still, in a country filled to the brim with weaponry and displaying a growing urge for violence (of which ecofascism is such a painful example), even those genuinely encouraging the greening of the planet have, sadly enough, not proven completely immune to the urge to deploy such tactics.

Last October, I experienced this personally. I gave an online talk about the role that rationing could play in curbing ecological destruction. The audience, including members of several West Coast environmental groups, seemed quite receptive. So, I was shocked when, as the hour ended, the moderator wrapped by veering into distinctly weird territory. Resolving the ecological crisis, he suddenly suggested, might require us to consider the “value” of “authoritarianism,” or more specifically, of “green fascism, or maybe green ‘equitable’ fascism.” As the session had already spilled into overtime, there was no opportunity for me to consider, much less discuss, how such ideas might have infiltrated a green movement that had long been peaceable indeed.

Radical movements to achieve a green, equitable society have been around at least since the rise of groups like Earth First! in the 1980s. In more recent times, however, movements like the Earth Liberation Front advocated damaging or destroying industrial infrastructure as an essential step toward a more ecologically sound society. For the past decade, the Deep Green Resistance movement has gone even further, insisting that the goal of such sabotage should be the complete collapse of industrial society. Only a return to pre-industrial civilization, it maintains, will give the planet room to heal, while creating opportunities for us to develop autonomous, egalitarian societies that exploit neither our fellow humans, nor nature.

In the 2011 book Deep Green Resistance, movement authors Lierre Keith, Aric McBay, and Derrick Jensen similarly argued that civilization’s industrial foundation needed to be completely pulverized, sooner rather than later. Convinced that “the vast majority of the population will do nothing unless they are led, cajoled, or forced,” they urged that “those of us who care about the future of the planet have to dismantle the industrial energy infrastructure as rapidly as possible.” Precipitous de-industrialization is necessary, they wrote, because so little time remains to prevent an ecological collapse complete enough to render the world unlivable for humanity. Therefore, “rapid collapse is ultimately good for humans — even if there is a die-off — because at least some people survive.” This is jarring stuff, to say the least, and it has rightly been subjected to withering criticism,

So far, the deep green resistance people have stuck to proselytizing and organizing, rather than any kind of real-world sabotage. On the political right, however, incidents of eco-infrastructure sabotage are indeed on the increase. Over the past year, for instance, there have been a rash of attacks on power grids nationwide by right-wing extremists, not environmentalists. A man and a woman arrested in February for planning to take down four power substations in the Baltimore area proved, not surprisingly, to espouse neo-Nazi views. And successful attacks on two North Carolina substations last December were also linked to neo-Nazism and white supremacy. In late 2022, the Department of Homeland Security warned that there had been a significant rise in online discussions among far-right elements focused on assaulting the power grid to trigger cascading blackouts across the country. That, they believed, could lead to a governmental collapse and so create openings for a fascist takeover. (In a country already featuring the Trumpublican Party, this should be unnerving, even if not exactly surprising.)

Hunter Walker, a reporter for Talking Points Memo, recently obtained a copy of an online magazine that advocated attacks on power substations and provided coaching to would-be saboteurs, while announcing, as if they were greens, “It is our belief that the techno-industrial system presents an absolute and urgent existential threat to all life on earth.”

Walker managed to track down one of the authors who told him that their aim was indeed to motivate not the far right but “militant groups of educated anarchists.” As the author acknowledged, however, the far right is “far better armed” and better prepared for shooting out transformers “than the Left or post-Left.” That being the case, the manual’s author added, if the question was whether “I would accept assistance or ‘alliance’ with any far-right group, I would hesitate to say no. I would much rather turn the lights out and then fight them in the quiet dark afterwards.”

This raises a question: Might radical individuals or even groups at opposite ends of the political spectrum ever converge on the same violent direct-action tactics?

Brian Tokar is on the faculty and board of the Institute for Social Ecology in Plainfield, Vermont, which offers courses on ecofascism. I asked him how much overlap he and his colleagues had noticed between violent, racist, ecofascist movements and nonviolent, anti-racist, radical environmental movements. Tokar responded, “I don’t think there’s a lot of overlap, but there’s certainly enough that it’s deeply disturbing.”

“This goes back,” he said, “to the… eighties when Dave Foreman and Edward Abbey [of the Earth First! movement] were saying a lot of disturbing things, including a lot of anti-immigrant stuff — especially Abbey, who was all about protecting the borders against people who, he said, would spread pollution. It was just blatantly racist… but there were also a lot of people who vocally challenged it from the beginning.”

“Fast forward to more recent times,” Tokar continued, “and my colleagues have documented stories of people who started out in leftist ecological circles and drifted over into an overtly ecological neo-fascist or neo-Nazi anti-immigrant kind of politics.” In fact, the ecofascists’ strategy, he added, “seems to be that if they can skim off a few people, especially people who have a following, they can shift the discussion in their direction.”

A Future in Danger

I feel confident in predicting that the ecofascists won’t manage to seize power by taking down the national electric grid. Still, by fueling human-rights abuses, racial hatred, and deadly violence, their toxic propaganda has made the United States a more perilous place to live if you weren’t born white and within its borders. By hijacking the message of ecological renewal and using it to persecute the powerless, they could, at a minimum, make it far more difficult for this country to act boldly in the future when it comes to the climate crisis and environmental justice. That’s why the message of such ecofascists has to be verbally shredded wherever and whenever they try to spread it.

The demise of Silicon Valley Bank last month triggered plenty of angst among solar energy developers. Before it collapsed, SBV claimed it had “financed or helped finance 62 percent of community solar projects in America,” according to Washington Post business reporter Evan Halper. At first, it wasn’t clear who might fill that gap. MAGA politicians took great delight in the disruption of what they tediously referred to as the “woke” economy. Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO) typically tweeted this non sequitur: “So these SVB guys spend all their time funding woke garbage — ‘climate change solutions’ — rather than actual banking.” Meanwhile, Stephen Miller, the vampirish mastermind of Donald Trump’s 2017 Muslim travel ban, asked all too rhetorically how much time and money that bank had spent on what he called equity, diversity, and climate “scams.”

Why has the right become so obsessed with climate-friendly banking? Here’s a clue to answering that question: just as MAGA-world was celebrating such an interruption in renewable-energy financing, red-state lawmakers were taking legal aim at private companies and local leaders considered insufficiently deferential to the fossil-fuel industry. In state after state, such politicians are now attempting to dictate the makeup of the American energy supply — sometimes putting a thumb on the scale, at other times stomping on it.

Dictating Climate Disruption

Despite the collapse of SVB, the solar industry appears in no danger of imploding. Plenty of other lenders are stepping in to compensate for the loss. But any banks riding to the rescue, or others that openly support non-fossil-fuel energy, had better brace themselves. Republican state politicians, wielding a lot more than mean tweets, are intent on waging all-out war against private companies that don’t cater to the oil, gas, and coal industries.

No surprise there. The right has long opposed any government action to curb climate change. Now, financial institutions and other private companies that, in their decision-making, consider not just profits but the environment, society, and governance (what’s now coming to be known as the “ESG” principles) risk finding themselves under ever heavier fire. The term ESG has been around for almost two decades, but the far-right assault on companies that adopt its precepts goes back only about three years.

This spring — a season in which old men’s thoughts turn to “woke-ism” and lots of state legislatures are in session — the crackdown on all things climate is only accelerating. MAGA legislators and treasurers are putting in place laws and regulations meant to prohibit state entities like pension funds from even considering climate issues when choosing where to make investments. Many are also planning to bar state agencies from doing business of any sort with private companies that refuse to deal with oil-, gas-, and coal-related enterprises.

When it comes to climate, it’s increasingly clear: the red-blue “national divorce” envisioned by Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) is already underway. In 15 of the 19 states that emit the most carbon per dollar of production (and, not coincidentally, are among the top oil, gas, and coal producers), Republicans have total control of both the statehouse and the governor’s mansion. Not surprisingly, it’s in those sooty states that legislative crackdowns on climate-conscious policies are proliferating. In contrast, at least 15 of the lowest-emitting states have passed, or at least considered, bills that aim to prohibit the investment of state funds in the fossil-fuel business.

In a March 11th post, the Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance reported on recent anti-climate activity in states across America. Idaho and North Dakota now have laws that prohibit officials from taking climate into account when investing state funds. Legislators in Iowa and Oklahoma have similar bills in the works, while state treasurers and attorneys general in Arizona, Florida, Indiana, Kentucky, and Mississippi have issued policy statements or directives aimed at punishing any company that considers climate change while making investment or production decisions.

Even more popular have been bills aimed at punishing private companies that “boycott” or “discriminate” against what are considered “ESG-disfavored industries,” particularly those involved in fossil-fuel or firearm production. Kentucky, New Hampshire, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Tennessee, West Virginia, and Wyoming currently have such laws on the books. And just since 2023 began, lawmakers in at least nine states have introduced “boycott bills” that, according to the Harvard group, tend to be even “broader or more prescriptive than initiatives currently in force.”

Newly passed anti-environmental laws have been put into action right away. For instance, Riley Moore, West Virginia’s treasurer, took the drastic step of announcing that his state would no longer enter into contracts with Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, Wells Fargo, and certain other major banks, because those companies have stopped dealing with the coal industry. When, on the heels of West Virginia’s ban, the Kentucky legislature passed its own boycott bill, Moore issued a press release congratulating his next-door neighbor, saying: “Kentucky joins our growing coalition of states that have taken concrete steps to push back against the woke capitalists who are trying to destroy our energy industries.”

Nor does it stop with banks. The Texas legislature is, for instance, gunning for insurance companies that refuse coverage to oil and gas companies. Republican state Senator Bryan Hughes assured the Dallas Morning News that “we’re pushing back hard” on any insurers that might consider withdrawing coverage from polluting industries. “If they’re gonna mess with money that belongs to Texas retirees and undermine the very Texas economy,” he added indignantly, “we’re gonna teach them some manners.”

Who Writes These Extreme Laws?

That so many states have been passing such legislation is anything but a fluke. Like other retrograde measures enacted in GOP-controlled states, those bills are based on “model legislation” drafted for legislators by an outfit called the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). One of that group’s model bills, the Eliminate Economic Boycotts Act, is sweeping, if convoluted, in its language. It prohibits state governments from investing in or dealing with any private company that “penalizes” or “inflicts economic harm on” another company because it’s involved in fossil-fuel extraction, logging, mining, or agriculture.

When the ability of businesses (as well as governmental agencies) to pursue climate-mitigation policies is restricted, our individual and collective right to nonviolently protest against climate-busting fuels becomes that much more important. Alas, that avenue to climate protection is also being barricaded. Since 2020, such street demonstrations have increasingly been met with right-wing and police violence, while protest directed specifically at fossil fuels is being outlawed outright. Last year, at Mother Jones magazine, Nina Lakhani reported, for instance, that ALEC was behind legislation in 24 states that criminalized grassroots protests against fossil-fuel infrastructure. By now, anti-protest legislation, most often zeroing in on climate activists and Indigenous Peoples’ communities, has been introduced in a staggering 45 states.

Support for oil, gas, and coal is also being orchestrated by an association of state treasurers located, of course, in this country’s most carbon-heavy regions. The State Financial Officers Foundation, with headquarters in Shawnee, Kansas, is, you won’t be surprised to learn, marshaling red-state financial officers and attorneys general to do regulatory battle against climate “wokeism.” Since 2021, it’s been urging state officials, according to New York Times climate desk reporter David Gelles, “to use their power to promote oil and gas interests and to stymie Mr. Biden’s climate agenda.”

That foundation, in turn, received financial support in 2021 not only from rabidly anti-climate groups like the Heartland Institute and the American Petroleum Institute, but also from some top financial services corporations, including Mastercard, Visa, Fidelity, and JPMorgan Chase. This raised CNBC’s eyebrows since those companies also “promote their own sustainability investment models” like ESG. Indeed, it’s widely expected that JPMorgan and some of the other big lenders that have been writing checks to those oily state financial officers will also be filling the solar-financing gap left by the demise of Silicon Valley Bank — diversifying their portfolios, so to speak.

Force-Feeding Fossil Fuelization, Community by Community

What about those states that find themselves on the other side of the national climate divorce, the ones rewarding ESG policies? Clearly, steering public funds away from the fossil-fuel industry is a much-needed approach in our world (and, by the way, the federal government could take another step in that direction right now by eliminating the $10 billion to $50 billion in tax subsidies it still grants the industry annually). Of course, to achieve a rapid phase-out of fossil fuels, far more would be needed. Market-based measures alone won’t bring about the precipitous decline in greenhouse-gas emissions that, in terms of extreme weather, the planet is screaming for ever more desperately. For that, urgent, direct action would be needed to suppress the extraction and use of coal, oil, and natural gas.

It goes without saying that coordinated nationwide action of that sort would be unimaginable in the American political universe of 2023. Even governors and legislatures determined to reduce carbon emissions can only achieve so much, given that their states exist in a national climate-policy vacuum and often share borders with ones in which increasingly authoritarian state legislatures are violating the local autonomy of communities and municipalities by force-feeding them fossil fuels.

For instance, Tennessee passed a law last year forbidding local governments from taxing or regulating any of the state’s energy infrastructure — with one qualification. The measure does not prohibit “a local action that affects facilities for the transmission, distribution, collection, conversion, and use of solar energy.” In the Volunteer State, you see, solar power is fair game for regulation and taxation, while fossil-fuel power is not.

As of last year, almost 20 states, all of them with legislatures under full Republican control, had laws on the books that forbid local governments from banning fossil-fuel gas connections in newly built homes. Even more intrusive is a Florida law that blocks local governments “from restricting fuel sources distributed and used by electric and gas utilities, power generators, pipeline operators, and propane dealers.”

As they snatch away the right of local communities to prevent not just pollution but the destruction of our world, such states are following a path that Texas blazed eight years ago. In 2015, local officials across the Lone Star State moved to ban the hazardous toxic-drilling method known as hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking.” In response, state legislators passed and Governor Greg Abbott signed a bill that forbids municipalities from regulating oil and gas operations.

Tom Giovanetti, president of a right-wing Dallas think tank, penned a commentarysupporting such suppression of local governance. Apparently unaware that he was coming up with some pretty good satire, he wrote,

“It’s absolutely true that the closer political power is to the people, the more responsive political power tends to be. But that can be a two-edged sword. Local governments are at least as capable as the feds of passing laws and ordinances that violate the presumption of liberty in the Constitution… Tyranny isn’t OK just because it is approved by a majority of your fellow townsfolk.”

Tyranny indeed! And don’t forget the “tyranny” of a world growing ever hotter and more extreme by the year.

They Keep Us Off Balance, in Fear

When MAGA legislators force their taxpayers to support the coal, oil, and natural gas industries, while undercutting the efforts of local governments to free their communities from fossil fuels, they’re not just empowering their fossil-fuelized campaign donors. Their anti-climate laws and regulations are also part of a broader effort to impose ever tighter right-wing political discipline on society. To that end, the authors of such laws — directly out of the authoritarian playbook — are intentionally vague about what constitutes “boycotting” or “discrimination.”

They don’t spell out, for example, what a fund manager can or cannot consider in deciding which companies to invest in. That kind of vagueness is woven into all sorts of anti-democratic bills and laws that have been bubbling up in state governments lately. It’s intended to keep those of us who care about this planet’s future and that of our children and grandchildren off balance, fearful, and less likely to do what’s needed to keep our world safe, sane, and functioning reasonably well.

Like a doctor who might delay aborting an ectopic pregnancy until it’s too late because his state’s anti-abortion law doesn’t specify how “near death” the mother must be before he can do so without going to prison, like the teacher who might censor her own lessons because she can’t be sure certain historical information won’t lead a student to feel ashamed of being white and falsely report her for teaching “critical race theory,” like the journalist who might shrink from covering a story about a MAGA politician for fear of being wrongly sued for defamation, it’s easy to imagine investment advisors who handle state pension funds or contractors who sell to state governments fearing not also doing business with oil and gas companies so they won’t be accused of “discrimination” or “boycotting” and lose their contracts.

It turns out that we don’t even have to imagine that last scenario; it’s already happening. As Gelles of the Times recently reported,

“There are some indications that the conservative pushback [against climate-friendly investing] is gaining traction. Vanguard, one of the world’s largest investment firms, recently withdrew from the Net Zero Asset Managers initiative, an effort intended to get institutional money managers engaged in the fight against climate change.”

This is bad news. At the very moment when the world’s most knowledgeable scientists are warning that an all-too-literal hell lies in store for us, tinpot legislators in MAGA states are preparing to enforce the dominance of a deeply fossil-fuelized version of capitalism. If so, the repercussions won’t stay confined within any state’s borders. All 50 states will be affected. That means, in turn, that communities are going to have to fight ever harder for the right of all of us to a livable future. Meanwhile, purple-and blue-state legislatures need to pass tougher laws that can help undermine the fossil-fuel industry. And the rest of us will have to focus big time on how best to flush coal, oil, and natural gas out of the economy for good before it’s too late.

Priti Gulati Cox and Stan Cox: A Death in the Family

It was almost 46 years ago, but I'll never forget the moment I last saw my mother, quite literally white as a sheet, being rolled away from me on a hospital gurney. I would never see her again and, to this day, regret that I couldn't have been at her side when she died. My father, who had a stroke when my mother was so desperately ill — I was endlessly at his side — partially recovered and lived on for another six years. I would one day find him seated dead in his bathroom, the dad I knew having visibly fled his body, leaving his open eyes empty of everything, or so it seemed to me then and still does today.

I was relatively young, just 33 years old, when my mother died and yet such moments live with you into the years when you begin to become your parents. And I had it easy all in all. Mine had enough money that we could hire someone remarkably caring to be with my dad in those last years of his life. As TomDispatch regulars Priti Gulati Cox and Stan Cox suggest today in telling their own moving tales of the deaths of their mothers, all too many of us on this planet have no such luck.

In fact, in so many places, life and death, such as it is, seems almost unimaginable to me. Just the other day, for instance, I read a New York Times report on Afghanistan, the country the U.S. left in the dust of history after 20 years of devastating, disastrous war-making. In that land where the Taliban are once again in control and women can no longer get a college education or work for a nongovernmental organization, while international aid of any sort has largely been halted, many children were already starving. As Times journalists Christina Goldbaum and Yaqoob Akbary report, this winter has proven a frigid hell of an extreme sort in that wounded land. Here's a description they offer of a single life (and death) there:

'One particularly cold night, [Niaz Mohammad] piled every stick and every shrub he had collected into their small wood stove. He scavenged for trash that might burn, covered the windows with plastic tarps and held his 2-month-old son close to his chest. But the cold was merciless… Soon the infant fell silent in his arms. His tears turned to ice that clung to his face. By daybreak, he was gone.' Imagine when it’s not your parents but your child dying… Frozen in your arms. What a hell on Earth!

And with all of that in mind, let me turn you over to Priti Gulati, Stan, and their mothers' last moments on this ever more embattled planet of ours. Tom

A Tale of Two Mothers: Dying with Dignity and What Makes That Possible

So many crises — from war to mass species die-offs to climate meltdown — afflict our world that we often don't take time to draw insights from what generally passes for the small stuff, the things that happen all too close to home, including aging. Most of us don't relish the prospect of getting old, much less watching our parents approach their deaths, something that's even worse if you're dying poor.

Having a parent die, whatever the circumstances, is bound to be wrenching. The best we daughters and sons can hope for is that our parents finish out their lives on their own terms and where they want to be — with loved ones nearby and suffering as little as possible. In recent years, the deaths of our own mothers at opposite ends of the globe seemed to highlight, in some modest fashion, the experiences of women who suffer debilitating health problems late in life, as well as the deep humanity and kindness shown them by the people whose work it is to help them exit this world in comfort and with dignity.

Priti's mother Santosh Gulati and Stan’s mother Brenda Cox were born just four months apart in 1932-1933 and died four years apart in 2018 and 2023. Both lived through an era in which most women’s existences were still bound by the decisions men made. Still, they achieved a great deal despite such constraints and enjoyed relatively good health, only to be hit hard by medical problems in their last years.

During her final decade, Santosh battled breast cancer while also suffering the physical and mental anguish of a rare neurological disease, progressive supranuclear palsy (PSP). She succumbed in 2018, at age 86. In her last decade, Brenda endured the ravages of severe osteoporosis, including chronic, ever-increasing pain from a cascade of excruciating fractures in her spine, along with a broken ankle and fractured hips. In her final five years, she was also stricken by rapidly advancing dementia. She died this February at 90.

Brenda's Story

In late 2018, Stan's family began facing a conundrum experienced daily around the world: What will we do when Brenda can no longer take care of herself? Stan’s daughter Sheila answered that question admirably by quitting her job in Kansas and moving to Georgia to care for her then-85-year-old grandmother full-time. A year later, the Covid-19 pandemic struck. Had Sheila not been able and willing to give four years of her life to such work, Brenda might have ended up dying earlier in a care institution, isolated, with advancing dementia — and like so many less fortunate elderly people in those darkest pandemic days, having to say her final goodbyes by telephone. Instead, for almost three years, Brenda stayed out of Covid–19's path and within reach of her far-flung family, even as her pain, physical disability, and dementia worsened. Then, one day in mid-December 2022, the pandemic finally came for her, carried most likely by a well-wishing visitor.

As her decline accelerated through January, she began losing her ability to swallow (partly because of her dementia), and the resulting aspiration of food and fluids worsened the pneumonia that had plagued her for months before she caught Covid. There was no way to reverse her decline. Before she was discharged from the hospital for the last time, her doctor asked us whether we wanted her problems to be treated "aggressively" with a feeding tube, intravenous fluids, and antibiotics, or whether we'd prefer to drop the losing battle with aspiration.

Brenda had been explicit in her advance directive: no artificial feeding. The whole family was in accord and committed to ensuring that she would feel as much happiness and comfort as possible in her home, with us, thanks to the indispensable support hospice nurses and aides provided us. In January 2023, she came home to the loving care of those hospice workers and her family.

With plenty of us there, someone (or ones) could always be holding Brenda's hand, often both of them, every minute of her dwindling waking hours and for much of the time she slept as well. And we could do our best to remember the words she was whispering ever less frequently as the hours passed — almost all of them sweet or funny or both. We laughed through our tears. Two days before the end, she was using what little breath she had left to speak largely unintelligible words and phrases. Still, the last thing she whispered, on Valentine's Day, was unmistakable: "I love all of you."

Santosh's Story

When Santosh Gulati died of PSP in December 2018, we were in Mumbai with her, as was most of her family. PSP, often misdiagnosed as Parkinson's Disease, is one of the cruelest illnesses. It eats away at the mind and the body all too slowly, until — the final symptom suffered by most — you can no longer swallow. The last meal she enjoyed before the hospital’s doctors put her on a feeding tube — against her family’s wishes — was her favorite: meetha (sweet) toast. (Consider it the Indian version of French toast.)

Specialists in the hospital were horrified when we insisted that she die naturally, that they not use artificial feeding to keep her physical body alive while only prolonging her agony. Her doctor warned us sternly, "That decision will come back to haunt you later in life."

We are indeed haunted, but not about our decision to let Priti's mother die with some dignity. That was the only loving, humane choice we felt we could make. We are haunted by the fact that so many poor Adivasis (tribal people), Muslims, Dalits, Christians, and other minority groups are living and dying under Hindu supremacy, with no semblance of justice, equality, or dignity.

Consider Kalavati, a poor, lower-caste woman who was Santosh's home caregiver. During one of her hospitalizations, Kalavati stayed in the room with her at night (because all patients were required to have a personal attendant present overnight) and only went home when daylight came and family members took over. One night in the hospital, Kalavati got a call notifying her that her oldest son, Arjun, who had been suffering from tuberculosis, was probably not going to make it to the morning. The first commuter train that could take her to her slum, however, wouldn’t depart until 4:00 a.m. Delayed for hours, she finally neared her house only to see her other two sons running toward her, shouting, "Ma, tu kahan thi? Bhaiya mar gaya!" ("Mama, where were you? Big brother has died!")

All along, Kalavati had been in an impossible position. She had to work outside her home so that her family could have food and shelter, which meant that, for much of the time, she couldn't cook or otherwise care for them. She couldn't even hold her son's hand as he died (as we did with our mothers). Once the funeral and the mourning period were over, she returned to care lovingly for Priti's mother until Santosh, too, died.

So, we were grieving for her even as Kalavati grieved for Arjun. His tuberculosis had only worsened when he started drinking heavily, despondent over the stress of growing up poor with a delinquent father while losing the girl he loved. Kalavati had spent all her extra money just to get him into the hospital for treatment. "But he wouldn't eat," she told us, "or take his medicines and I had to throw them away. 'Arjun, take your medicine,' I said. 'You will die if you don't.'" As she so vividly recalled, he then replied, "No, Ma, I don't want to live and you have my two young brothers to take care of." There was no hope, the doctors told her. "After I brought him home, I tried giving him a little water, some pineapple juice… Then, in the end, my child's body completely took hold of the ground. Khalas [finished]. There was no strength left in him to get up," she told Priti through her tears. "Then I came to work [for Santosh] and after a few days he died."

Kalavati is one of so many Indian women born into poverty-stricken families who, once married, are abandoned by their husbands and left to care for children singlehandedly. (Her husband left her in 2013.) Many of them also work as maids or caregivers to children or elders in middle-class homes. Out of desperation, many are compelled to neglect their own sons, daughters, and elders to earn a living that isn't faintly enough to lift them out of poverty. At best, it's just enough to help them and their loved ones survive. That's no accident. It's what keeps capitalism going in India.

Our pain at losing Santosh, who had rarely been free to make her own decisions and ended up suffering from a horrific illness, proved deep and long-lasting. But at least we knew she had died serving her family, not someone else's. Imagine instead being the son or daughter of a mother who believes her life has no meaning. That's what Kalavati once told Priti through her tears: "Jeene ka koi matlab he nahi hai." ("There is no reason to live.") But live women must. Because women so often turn out to be caregivers to someone — only some of us are fortunate that the someone is our own.

We Know How Lucky We've Been

Disparities in the kind of care people receive as they die are widespread, not only between but also within societies. For instance, American hospice use is lower among Black patients in part because, when discussing the end of life with them, physicians tend to provide less information about their diagnosis, outlook, and treatment options, including hospice.

One of the registered nurses whose care Brenda received (and who also came to our aid moments after Brenda died) was Black. We were curious about her experience in hospice work, so we got in touch with her a couple of days later. By text, Donna (not her real name) told us how she and her autistic son had suffered the effects of systemic racism in the overall medical system. She added, more broadly, that, in her 30 years of nursing, she has seen striking disparities in the treatment of White patients versus Black or Latino ones. However, she wrote, having worked in pediatrics, geriatrics, oncology, and hospice, "I have seen the least disparity in hospice care. Our hospice department is very sensitive to cultural differences and they do their best to provide the best care possible for everyone." So, the chief racial disparity is not necessarily in the quality of hospice care but in the reduced opportunities for Black patients to get into it in the first place.

We are deeply mindful of how fortunate both of our families were to have our mothers' sad final journeys end at home surrounded by our collective love. We were, above all, fortunate indeed to have the kinds of flexible work schedules most people don't have, as well as the ability to travel, and enough funds to make it all possible. Far too many Indian and American families won't have the resources to care for their loved ones at home as they age and die.

In India, only a small minority of families have access to adequate medical care for their loved ones in the last weeks of their lives and even fewer have hospice care that allows them to die with comfort and dignity. For Santosh, there was no hospice available. Her family, like many there, had to improvise. Medical care and the services of home caregivers are, however, far more affordable in India than in the U.S., thanks largely to the low wages of so many healthcare workers. But even then, among India's poor majority, including Kalavati's family, the costs of most medical care and all home care remain out of reach.

Most Indians do die at home with their families, but mainly without medical support. A recent study found that, of the 5.4 million people a year in India who need palliative care, only 1% receive it. Crucially, therefore, Santosh couldn't benefit from the kinds of pain medications that kept Brenda comfortable during her last days. The experiences of our American and Indian families differed in other ways. Brenda's doctors and nurses were open and frank about her prospects and didn't urge extraordinary measures to keep her nominally alive; Santosh's were not. Neither of our families is wealthy. Although we both did have the financial means necessary to care for our mothers, Brenda also benefited greatly from Medicare. India offered no such help for Santosh.

And one more factor: Brenda and all of us descended from her are White, so our efforts to make her last days good ones were not disrupted by systemic racism, as they are for so many in this country.

There's a saying in India: jispe beet-tee hai woh he janata hai (only the one who's going through it knows). Santosh used that with Priti once — speaking not of her own suffering but of someone else's. In Santosh's final weeks, old Bollywood songs would play each evening on the TV in her bedroom. Four years later, while we stood around Brenda's bed at dusk as she breathed her last, a song Priti had heard in Santosh's room the very evening she died played over and over in her head. It was from the 1971 film Anand, about a doctor who struggles to decide between keeping patients alive and accepting death when it's inevitable:

"Kahin Door Jab Din Dhal Jaaye"

Kahin dur jab din dhal jaye
Sanjh ki dulhan badan churaye
Chupke se aaye
Mere khayalon ke aangan mein
Koi sapnon ke deep jalaye

(Somewhere far away when the day sets
The bride of dusk steals the body
She comes quietly
In the courtyard of my thoughts
Someone lights up lamps of dreams)

Kabhi yoon he jab hui bhojal saansen
Bhar aye baithe baithe jab yoon he ankhen
Kabhi machal ke pyaar se chal ke
Chhue koi mujhe par nazar na aye
Nazar na aye
Kahin dur…

(Sometimes just like that the breath becomes heavy
When my eyes well up just sitting there
Then, fluttering, moving with love
Someone, touches me, but I cannot see her
I cannot see her
Somewhere far away…)

Rest in peace, Brenda, Santosh, and every other mother who gave so much and suffered so greatly.

Stan Cox and Priti Gulati Cox: "We Have Not Yet Been Defeated"

Oxfam puts the matter all too strikingly: “The number of climate-related disasters has tripled in the last 30 years. Between 2006 and 2016, the rate of global sea-level rise was 2.5 times faster than it was for almost all of the 20th century. More than 20 million people a year are forced from their homes by climate change.” And, of course, that’s just to begin a rundown of what’s already becoming an endless list of unprecedented floods, fires, megadroughts, melting ice and rising sea levels, ever more devastating storms, and so on down a list that only gets longer by the year. And the human toll from all this, especially in the Global South, grows ever more horrifying.

Take, as an example, drought caused significantly by the overheating of this planet — and here, I’m not thinking about the 500-year record drought in Europe last summer, the heat of which is estimated to have been responsible for more than 20,000 deaths, or the 1,200-year record megadrought in the American West (now moving east), or the record-blazing temperatures in China for two months last summer. No, what’s on my mind are the climate-change-influenced droughts that have repeatedly struck the Horn of Africa after five seasons of failed rains, the latest of which is so severe that, in Somalia alone, hundreds of thousands of people (particularly starving children) could die in the resulting famine.

Yes, climate change is increasing the death toll in the rich industrial countries of the Global North, too. In 2021, for instance, the United States experienced 20 billion-dollar climate and weather disasters, the second largest group of them in its history. (You undoubtedly won’t be surprised to discover that the record — 22 — was set only the year before and will undoubtedly be broken again in the years to come.) From them came an estimated 688 direct or indirect deaths. And that is, of course, a horror, but still a relatively modest number compared to the 1,700 or more Pakistanis who died from this year’s singularly devastating summer floods alone, and if Africa’s famine turns out as expected, that number will be less than nothing by comparison.

Sadly, unlike the northern powers largely responsible for the greenhouse gases that created this growing set of disasters, as TomDispatch regulars Stan and Priti Gulati Cox explain today, the countries of the Global South can’t afford to pay for what’s happening to them. And at a time when the major fossil-fuel companies — housed, of course, largely in the Global North — are still raking in staggering profits off their oil and natural gas supplies, as that line straight out of my childhood went: there oughta be a law. Sadly, there isn’t, even though, when you think about it, those fossil-fuel companies could be considered the real terrorists of Planet Earth. Tom

Paying for an Overheating Earth: Whose Planet Are We On?

On October 29th, 75-year-old Saifullah Paracha, Guantánamo Bay’s oldest detainee, was finally released by U.S. authorities and flown home to his family in Karachi, Pakistan. He had been incarcerated for nearly two decades without either charges or a trial. His plane touched down in a land still reeling from this year’s cataclysmic monsoon floods that, in July, had covered an unparalleled one-third of that country. Even his own family’s neighborhood, the well-heeled Defense Housing Authority complex, had been thoroughly inundated with, as a reporter wrote at the time, “water gushing into houses.”

Having endured 19 years of suffering inflicted by the brute force of imperialism during America’s “Global War on Terror,” Paracha, along with all of Pakistan, will now suffer through the climatic devastation wrought by the invisible hand of economic imperialism. Indeed, even as his family members were embracing him for the first time since that fateful day in 2003 when he was seized in an FBI sting operation in Thailand, governments and corporations throughout the Global North were sharpening their knives, preparing to reassert their dominance as they do at every year’s U.N. climate conference — this one being COP27 in Sharm el Sheikh, Egypt.

But delegates from climate-vulnerable, cash-poor countries like Pakistan and Egypt, along with members of climate-justice movements from across the planet, were also there. Tired of being pushed around, they had other plans.

A Breakthrough and an All-Too-Predictable Flop

At previous COPs, negotiations inside the hall were focused primarily on what’s come to be known as “climate mitigation” — that is, trying to keep future greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere — along with adaptation to climate disruptions, past, present, and future. For the first time in official negotiations, COP27 would also feature the demands of low-income, vulnerable countries eager to be compensated for the devastating impacts they, like flooded Pakistan, have already suffered or will suffer thanks to climate change. After all, the global overheating of the present moment was caused by greenhouse gases emitted during the past two centuries, chiefly by the large industrial societies of the global North. In the shorthand of those negotiations, such polluter-pays compensation is known as “loss and damage.”

At previous climate summits, the “haves” resisted the very idea of the have-nots demanding loss-and-damage compensation for two chief reasons: first, they preferred not to admit, even implicitly, that they had created the crisis now broiling and drowning communities across the Global South, and, second, they had no interest in shelling out the humongous sums that would then be required.

This year, however, the shocking death and destruction inflicted by the inundation of Pakistan and more recently of Nigeria stoked an already surging movement to put loss and damage on COP’s agenda for the first time. And thanks to unrelenting pressure from that climate-justice groundswell, COP27 did end with the United States, the European Union, and the rest of the rich world approving an agreement to “establish a fund for responding to loss and damage.” Echoing the thoughts of many, climate justice leader Jean Su tweeted that the deal was “a testament to the incredible mobilization of vulnerable countries and civil society. Much work still to be done, but a dam has broken.”

The euphoria that followed over the creation of a loss-and-damage fund was well justified. But, as Su noted, the struggle is far from over. In a correction to its story reporting on that agreement, the Washington Post made clear that, although the batter had now been mixed, the cake was anything but in the oven. The paper informed readers, “An earlier version of this article incorrectly said wealthy nations agreed to pay billions of dollars into a loss and damage fund. While they agreed to create a fund, its size and financing mechanism have yet to be worked out.” Those two remaining how-much and how-to-do-it questions are anything but trivial. In the loss-and-damage debate, in fact, they’re the main issues countries have been arguing over for many years without resolution of any sort.

If the world does commit sufficient (or even insufficient) funds to pay out on loss and damage (and that’s a truly big if ), vulnerable countries may finally have the means to begin recovering from the latest climate disasters. Tragically enough, however, there’s little question that, as ever greater amounts of carbon and methane continue to head for our atmosphere, whatever the affected populations may need now, it’s likely just a hint of the sort of compensation they’ll need in a future guaranteed to be full of ever-increasing numbers of disasters like the Pakistan floods.

And the reason for that isn’t complicated: COP27 negotiators failed to match their loss-and-damage breakthrough with any significant progress on reining in greenhouse gas emissions. Efforts to come to an agreement on phasing out the chief sources of those emissions — oil, gas, and coal — flopped, as they have at all previous COPs. The only thing the negotiators could manage was to repeat last year’s slippery pledge to pursue a “phase-down [not ‘-out’] of unabated [not ‘all’] coal [nor ‘coal, gas, and oil’] power.”

On the one hand, civil-society movements prevailed in the debate over loss and damage. On the other, energy imperialism remained all too alive and well in Egypt, as corporate interests and the governments that serve them extended their 27-year winning streak of blocking efforts to drive emissions down at the urgently required rate. Yeb Saño, who led Greenpeace’s COP27 delegation, told Phys.org, “It is scarcely credible that they have forgotten all about fossil fuels. Everywhere you look in Sharm el Sheikh you can see and hear the influence of the fossil fuel industry. They have shown up in record numbers to try and decouple climate action from a fossil fuel phaseout.”

How to Pay?

The World Bank estimates that the floods in Pakistan caused more than $30 billion in damage, while rehabilitation and reconstruction will cost another $16 billion. And that, says the bank, doesn’t even include funds that will be needed “to support Pakistan’s adaptation to climate change and overall resilience of the country to future climate shocks.” The floods seriously harmed an estimated 33 million people, displaced 8 million from their homes, and left more than 1,700 dead. According to the World Bank’s report, “Loss of household incomes, assets, rising food prices, and disease outbreaks are impacting the most vulnerable groups. Women have suffered notable losses of their livelihoods, particularly those associated with agriculture and livestock.” The disaster starkly illustrated the indisputable moral and humanitarian grounds for compelling the governments of rich countries to pay for the devastation their decades of fossil-fuel burning have caused.

For Pakistan in particular, America’s lavishly funded war-making and national-security industries are joined at the hip with the global climate emergency. While those forces are directly responsible for depriving Paracha and countless others of their freedom or lives, the greenhouse-gas emissions they generate have also contributed to the kind of devastation that he came home to when finally released. Furthermore, these industries have wasted trillions of dollars that could have been spent on preventing, adapting to, and compensating for ecological breakdown.

So far this fall, Washington has pledged $97 million (with an “m”) in flood-relief aid to Pakistan. Sounds like a lot of money, but it amounts to just one five-hundredth of the World Bank’s loss-and-damage estimate. In bleak contrast, from 2002 to 2010 alone, at the height of that Global War on Terror, the U.S. government provided Pakistan with $13 billion (with a “b”) in military aid.

To dodge blame and minimize their costs, the rich countries have been proposing a range of alternatives to simply paying loss-and-damage money to low-income ones as they should. Instead, they’d far prefer to have disaster-plagued governments finance their own climate-change recovery and adaptation by borrowing from banks in the North. In effect, rather than obtain relief-and-recovery funds directly from the North, countries like Pakistan would be obligated to make interest payments to banks in the North.

Fed up with having unbearable debt burdens thrust upon them time and time again, countries in the South are saying no thanks to the proposition that they go even deeper into debt. In response, the North has been tossing out other ideas. For instance, encouraging development banks like the World Bank or the International Monetary Fund to release disaster-hit countries from their obligations to pay some portion of the money they already owe as interest on past debts and use it instead to support their own recovery and rebuilding. But countries in the South are saying, in effect, “Hey, for decades, you’ve used your power to saddle us with punishing, unjust debt. By all means, please do cancel that debt, but you’ve still got to pay us for the climate loss and damage you’ve caused.”

The rich countries have even floated the idea of taking a portion of the money they’ve previously earmarked for development aid and depositing it in a global fund that would pay damages to vulnerable countries suffering future climatic disasters. Note the key to all such “solutions”: no extra expense for the wealthy countries. What a sweet deal! It’s as if, domestically, the U.S. government started issuing smaller Social Security checks and used the money it “saved” that way to pay Medicare benefits.

The new COP27 loss-and-damage fund is supposed to prohibit such shell games, while also pulling climate finance out of the realms of imperialism, debt servitude, and what Oxfam calls the “disaster begging bowl.” What’s needed, says Oxfam, an organization focused on alleviating global poverty, is “a fair and automatic mechanism for financial support — rooted in the principle that those who have contributed most to the climate crisis pay for the damage it causes in countries least responsible and hardest hit.”

How Much and Where to Get It?

When confronted with numbers ending in “-illion,” as Americans were during the debates over the congressional spending bills of 2021 and 2022, it’s easy enough for your eyes to glaze over and miss the orders-of-magnitude differences among such figures. In an American world where the Pentagon budget alone is headed for $1 trillion sometime in this decade, it’s easy enough to forget, for example, that a million of those dollars is just one-millionth of a trillion of them. In response, in discussing the staggering sums needed to deal with our already desperately overheating planet and the amounts available to pay for loss and damage, we’ll now put everything in terms of billions of U.S. dollars.

High-emitting countries like ours have run up quite a climate tab. A June 2022 report from the V-20 group, which represents 55 of the world’s lowest-income, most climate-vulnerable economies, estimates that, from 2000 to 2019, their membership lost $525 billion thanks to climate disruption. That’s a huge blow to a staggeringly large set of countries whose gross domestic products add up to just $2,400 billion. But in the Global North, such sums and even far larger ones, while more than pocket change, are still easily affordable, as that Pentagon budget suggests.

By Oxfam’s reckoning, hundreds of billions of dollars could be raised for paying loss-and-damage by taxing fossil-fuel extraction, international cargo shipping, frequent flying, and other significantly carbon-producing activities. Progressive wealth taxes could net even more: $3,600 billion annually, according to the Climate Action Network (CAN), which also estimates that ending government subsidies to corporations (one-third of which go to fossil-fuel companies) could net $1,800 billion annually. Furthermore, cuts in military spending could free up a whopping $2,000 billion per year globally. The latter could be an especially juicy target. For instance, by CAN’s estimate, the United States’s fair share of payments owed to the Global South for climate mitigation and adaptation, plus loss-and-damage reparations, would come to roughly $1,600 billion over the next decade. And those 10 payments of $160 billion each could be covered if the Pentagon just ditched production of its most disastrously expensive jet fighter, the $1,700 billion F-35, and diverted the money toward climate assistance.

It’s always the government’s job to spend big when America faces a dire emergency, wherever the money comes from. In 2020-2021, Congress passed more than $3,000 billion in Covid relief — enough to pay our international climate tab, as estimated by CAN, for 19 years.

“Our Cause Is One”

Shortly after Saifullah Paracha’s return to Karachi in October, another family, in Sharm el Sheikh 2,340 miles away, had embarked on what reporter Jeff Shenker called “a desperate and possibly reckless mission” to save the life of one of their own: the British-Egyptian human-rights activist Alaa Abd el-Fattah, possibly Egypt’s most prominent political prisoner.

Abd el-Fattah, who has spent most of the last decade behind bars for speaking out against Egypt’s oppressive regime, had been on a partial hunger strike since April. After visiting him on November 18th, his family reported that he had broken his hunger strike “out of a desire to stay alive, but he would resume it if no progress was made regarding his freedom.” His sister Sanaa Seif told reporters inside the COP27 conference hall:

He’s not in prison for the Facebook post they charged him with. He’s in prison because he’s someone who makes people believe the world can be a better place. He’s someone trying to make the world a better place… There are tens of thousands of political prisoners in Egypt. There are more around the world. Climate activists get arrested, kidnapped in Latin America. We face the same kind of oppression, and our cause is one.

What is Guantánamo Bay but a place where the American empire has practiced its human-breaking tactics for 20 years without accountability offshore of any system of justice? What is the U.N. climate summit but a meeting place where the world’s elite have protected their power for 27 years and counting?

Living as a “forever prisoner” (as the Guardian dubbed Saifullah Paracha in 2018) was, he once said, “like being alive in your own grave.” Forever wars, forever prisoners, forever climate chaos, forever theft. That’s the world we live in, where governments like those of the United States and Egypt throw innocent Muslims like Saifullah Paracha and pro-democracy dissidents like Alaa Abd el-Fattah into prison for standing in the way of their forever-repressive interests.

Reporting on the struggle to free Abd el-Fattah, Shenker noted, “The phrase ‘We Have Not Yet Been Defeated’ became the unofficial slogan of COP27, a reference to the title of a book by Abd el-Fattah published in 2021, ‘You Have Not Yet Been Defeated.’” Could the perseverance and courage of people like Paracha, Abd el-Fattah, and the activists for climate justice and human rights — both those who attended the conference at Sharm el Sheik and countless others around the world — make it possible someday to drop the “Yet” and say simply, “We Have Not Been Defeated”?

Cox and Cox – The New Great Game?

I’m anything but a mathematician. Still, the numbers should take anyone’s breath away. Last spring, South Asia experienced a staggering heatwave, with temperatures soaring daily and breaking records in parts of India and Pakistan. Worse yet, scientists have found that such heatwaves are now 30 times more likely to recur there than once upon a time, thanks to human-caused climate change. Similarly, this summer in the Northern hemisphere, Europe, China, and North America all had record-breaking droughts. The European one was the worst in at least 500 years; the ongoing drought in the American West is the worst in 1,200 years; the one in China simply broke all records. Major rivers dried up from the Rhine to the Colorado to the Yangtze, while people everywhere suffered.

And — if you don’t mind my using the word yet again — worst of all, a new scientific analysis of those droughts suggests that global warming has made them 20 times more likely to occur than was true a century ago. Mind you, with the continued staggering release of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere (only aggravated by the war in Ukraine), the global temperature is expected to rise yet more in the years to come, ensuring that such studies will have to be repeated and amended again and again.

Sigh… This means, of course, that the rush for some kind of green revolution seems beyond necessary and yet, as TomDispatch regular Stan and — a new author for this site — Priti Cox point out today, that’s easier said than done. As they suggest, trying to simply recreate a green equivalent of our present world, vehicle by vehicle, could prove but another formula for disaster. Tom

Are Green Resource Wars Looming? The Burden of Massive EV Batteries Will Be Borne by People and Ecosystems

Much of the excitement over the Inflation Reduction Act, which became law this summer, focused on the boost it should give to the sales of electric vehicles. Sadly, though, manufacturing and driving tens of millions of individual electric passenger cars won’t get us far enough down the road to ending greenhouse-gas emissions and stanching the overheating of this planet. Worse yet, the coming global race to electrify the personal vehicle is likely to exacerbate ecological degradation, geopolitical tensions, and military conflict.

The batteries that power electric vehicles are likely to be the source of much international competition and the heart of the problem lies in two of the metallic elements used to make their electrodes: cobalt and lithium. Most deposits of those metals lie outside the borders of the United States and will leave manufacturers here (and elsewhere) relying heavily on foreign supplies to electrify road travel on the scale now being envisioned.

Adventurers and Opportunists

In the battery business, the Democratic Republic of Congo is referred to as “the Saudi Arabia of cobalt.” For two decades, its cobalt — 80% of the world’s known reserves — has been highly prized for its role in mobile-phone manufacturing. Such cobalt mining has already taken a terrible human and ecological toll.

Now, the pressure to increase Congo’s cobalt output is intensifying on a staggering scale. Whereas a phone contains just thousandths of a gram of cobalt, an electric vehicle battery has pounds of the metal, and a quarter-billion such batteries will have to be manufactured to fully electrify the American passenger car fleet as it now exists.

Not surprisingly, the investment world is now converging on Congo’s capital, Kinshasa. In a remarkable series of articles late last year, the New York Times reported on how the cobalt rush in that country has been caught up “in a familiar cycle of exploitation, greed, and gamesmanship that often puts narrow national aspirations above all else.” The most intense rivalry is between China, which has, in recent years, been buying up cobalt-mining operations in Congo at a rapid clip, and the United States, now playing catch-up. Those two nations, wrote the Times, “have entered a new ‘Great Game’ of sorts,” a reference to the nineteenth-century confrontation between the Russian and British Empires over Afghanistan.

Fifteen of 19 cobalt mines in Congo are now under Chinese control. In and around those mines, the health and the safety of workers have been severely compromised, while local residents have been displaced from their homes. People sneaking into the area to collect leftover lumps of cobalt to sell are being shot at. The killing of one man by the Congolese military (at the urging of Chinese mine owners) spurred an uprising in his village, during which a protester was also shot and killed.

The Times further reported, “Troops with AK-47s were posted outside the mine this year, along with security guards hired from a company founded by Erik Prince.” Prince is notorious for having been the founder and boss of the mercenary contractor Blackwater, which committed atrocities during America’s “forever wars” of the 2000s. Among other mayhem, Blackwater mercenaries fired upon unarmed civilians in both Iraq and Afghanistan and were convicted of the killings and woundings that resulted. From 2014 to 2021, he was the chair of a China-based company, Frontier Services Group, that provided Blackwater-style services to mining companies in Congo.

Prince has joined what the Times calls “a wave of adventurers and opportunists who have filled a vacuum created by the departure of major American mining companies, and by the reluctance of other traditional Western firms to do business in a country with a reputation for labor abuses and bribery.”

Neo-Conquistadors

Forbes reported recently that 384 additional mines may be needed worldwide by 2035 to keep battery factories supplied with cobalt, lithium, and nickel. Even were there to be a rapid acceleration of the recycling of metals from old batteries, 336 new mines would still be needed. A battery-industry CEO told the magazine:

If you just look at Tesla’s ambition to produce 20 million electric vehicles a year in 2030, that alone will require close to two times the present global annual supply [of those minerals] and that’s before you include VW, Ford, GM, and the Chinese.

Currently, the bulk of the world’s lithium production occurs in Australia, Chile, and China, while there are vast unexploited reserves in the southern part of Bolivia where it joins Chile and Argentina in what’s come to be known as the “lithium triangle.” China owns lithium mines outright throughout that triangle and in Australia, and two-thirds of the world’s lithium processing is done in Chinese-owned facilities.

Lithium extraction and processing is not exactly a green business. In Chile’s Atacama Desert, for instance, where lithium mining requires vast evaporation ponds, a half million gallons of water are needed for every metric ton of lithium extracted. The process accounts for 65% of the total amount of water used in that region and causes extensive soil and water contamination, as well as air pollution.

While evidently uninterested in Mother Nature, Tesla’s electric car tycoon Elon Musk is intensely interested in vertically integrating lithium mining with electric battery and vehicle production on the Chinese model. Accordingly, he’s been trying for years to get his hands on Bolivia’s pristine lithium reserves. Until ousted in a 2020 coup, that country’s president Evo Morales stood in Musk’s way, pledging to “industrialize with dignity and sovereignty.”

When a Twitter user accused Musk of being complicit in the coup, the Tesla tycoon responded, “We will coup whoever we want! Deal with it.” (He later deleted the tweet.) As Vijay Prashad and Alejandro Bejarano observed at the time, “Musk’s admission, however intemperate, is at least honest… Earlier this year, Musk and his company revealed that they wanted to build a Tesla factory in Brazil, which would be supplied by lithium from Bolivia; when we wrote about that we called our report ‘Elon Musk Is Acting Like a Neo-Conquistador for South America’s Lithium.’”

Bolivia continues to seek to exploit its lithium resources while keeping them under national control. Without sufficient wealth and technical resources, however, its government has been obliged to solicit foreign capital, having narrowed the field of candidate companies to six — one American, one Russian, and four Chinese. By year’s end, it’s expected to select one or more of them to form a partnership with its state-owned firm, Yacimientos de Litios Bolivianos. No matter who gets the contract, friction among the three suitor nations could potentially kick off a Western Hemispheric version of the Great Game.

And whatever you do, don’t forget that Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, a lithium-rich land with centuries of bitter experience in hosting great powers, is another potential arena for rivalry and conflict. In fact, Soviet invaders first identified that country’s lithium resources four decades ago. During the U.S. occupation of Afghanistan in this century, geologists confirmed the existence of large deposits, and the Pentagon promptly labeled the country — you guessed it — a potential “Saudi Arabia of lithium.” According to the Asia-Pacific-based magazine The Diplomat, the lithium rush is now on there and “countries like China, Russia, and Iran have already revealed their intentions to develop ‘friendly relations’ with the Taliban,” as they compete for the chance to flaunt their generosity and “help” that country exploit its resources.

Don’t Look Down

The greatest potential for conflict over battery metals may not, in fact, be in Asia, Africa, or the Americas. It may not be on any continent at all. The most severe and potentially most destructive future battleground may lie far out in international waters, where polymetallic nodules — dense mineral lumps, often compared to potatoes in their size and shape — lie strewn in huge numbers across vast regions of the deep-ocean floor. They contain a host of metallic elements, including not only lithium and cobalt but also copper, another metal required in large amounts for battery manufacturing. According to a United Nations report, a single nodule field, the 1.7 million-square-mile Clarion-Clipperton Zone (CCZ) in the Pacific Ocean southeast of the Hawaiian Islands, contains more cobalt than all terrestrial resources combined.

A U.N. agency, the International Seabed Authority, issues exploration licenses to mining companies sponsored by national governments and intends to start authorizing nodule extraction in the CCZ as soon as next year. Mining methods for polymetallic nodules have not yet been fully developed or used on a large scale, but the metal hunters are advertising the process as being far less destructive than the terrestrial mining of cobalt and lithium. One can get the impression that it will be so gentle as not even to be mining as we’ve known it, but something more like running a vacuum cleaner along the seafloor.

Don’t believe it for a second. In just a small portion of the CCZ, scientists have identified more than 1,000 animal species and they suspect that at least another thousand are also living there, along with 100,000 microbial species. Virtually all of the creatures in the path of mining operations will, of course, be killed, and anything living on the surface of those nodules removed from the ecosystem. The nodule-harvesting machines, as large as wheat combines, will stir up towering clouds of sediment likely to drift for thousands of miles before finally settling onto, burying, and so killing yet more sea life.

To recap: In America, the Saudi Arabia of green greed, we now covet a couple of metals critically important to the electric-vehicle industry, cobalt and lithium, the reserves of which are concentrated in only a small number of nations. However, the ores can also be sucked straight off the seabed in humongous quantities in places far outside the jurisdiction of any nation. Environmentally, geopolitically, militarily, what could possibly go wrong?

Plenty, of course. Writing for the Center for International Maritime Security last year, U.S. Coast Guard Surface Warfare Officer Lieutenant Kyle Cregge argued that the Coast Guard and Navy should have a high-profile presence in seabed mining areas. He stressed that the 1980 Deep Seabed Hard Mineral Resource Act “claimed the right of the U.S. to mine the seabed in international waters, and specifically identifies the Coast Guard as responsible for enforcement.”

He did acknowledge that patrolling areas where deep-sea mining occurs could create some dicey situations. As he put it, “The Coast Guard will face the same problem the U.S. Navy does with its freedom of navigation operations in places like the South China Sea.” But by potentially putting their vessels in harm’s way, he wrote, “the services seek to reinforce the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea as reflecting customary international law.” (Forget the fact that the U.S. has never signed onto the Law of the Sea treaty!) Cregge then predicted that, “[a]mong the most challenging in a future seabed competition would be China and Russia, states that have already used lawfare in the South China Sea and Arctic regions respectively to pursue their territorial gains.”

To make matters worse, seafloor mining might not only spark military conflict but also become an integral part of warfighting itself. Manabrata Guha, a researcher in war theory at the University of New South Wales, told Australia’s ABC television that data, including topographic or thermal maps of the seabed, obtained through exploration of the seafloor by mining operations projects, could be of great value to a nation’s armed forces. According to ABC:

Just 9 percent of the ocean floor is mapped in high resolution, compared to about 99 percent of the surface of Mars — a blind spot that affects both deep sea miners and military planners. This is all worth keeping in mind, because while the Pacific Ocean is set to be the sea with the most mining potential, it is also home to this century’s most consequential geopolitical tension: the rise of China, and the U.S.’s response to it.

The resource-rich South China Sea in particular, notes ABC, has long been a potential flashpoint between China and America. As Guha speculated, U.S. use of deep-sea data in the region “could be expanded beyond its battle-centric focus to also include attacks on civilian infrastructure, finance, and cultural systems.” He added, “The undersea domain provides another vector, another potential ‘hole’ that the Americans would look to penetrate,” thanks to the fact, as he pointed out, that the U.S. is 20 to 30 years ahead of China in undersea-mapping technology.

“You want to pick and choose where you hurt the adversary to such an extent that their whole system collapses,” he said. “That’s the idea of multi-domain warfare… the idea is to bring about systemic collapse.”

The Burden of the Big-Ass Truck

Systemic collapse? Really? Instead of devising technologies to take down other societies, in this increasingly heated moment, shouldn’t we be focusing on how to avoid our own systemic collapse?

A national fleet of battery-powered cars is unlikely to prove sustainable and could have catastrophic consequences globally. It’s time to consider an overhaul of the whole transportation system to move it away from a fixation on personal vehicles and toward walking, pedaling, and a truly effective nationwide public transportation system (as well as very local ones), which could indeed be run on electricity, while perhaps helping to avoid future disastrous resource wars.

Such a transformation, even were it to occur, would, of course, take a long time. During that period, electric vehicles will continue to be manufactured in quantity. So, for now, to reduce their impact on humanity and the Earth, America should aim to produce fewer and far smaller vehicles than are currently planned. After all, electrified versions of the big-ass trucks and SUVs of the present moment will also require bigger, heavier batteries (like the one in the F-150 Lightning pickup truck, which weighs 1,800 pounds and is the size of two mattresses). They will, of course, contain proportionally larger quantities of cobalt, lithium, and copper.

The true burden of a massive battery in an electric car or truck will be borne not just by the vehicle’s suspension system, but by the people and ecosystems unlucky enough to be in or near the global supply chain that will produce it. And those people may be among the first of millions to be imperiled by a new wave of geopolitical and military conflicts in what should be thought of as the world’s green sacrifice zones.

Stan Cox, A War on the Earth?

In so many ways, you still wouldn’t know it — not, that is, if you focused on the Pentagon budget or the economic growth paradigm that rules this country and our world — but this planet is in a crisis of a sort humanity has never before faced. Whether you’re considering heat in the American West, floods in Pakistan, the drying up of the Yangtze River in China, record drought in Europe, or the unparalleled warming of the Arctic, we are, as scientists have been pointing out (and ever more of us ordinary people have noted), in an increasingly “uncharted territory of destruction.” In the process, ever more climate “tipping points” stand in danger of being passed as the overheating of this planet becomes the stuff of everyday life.

And sadly, despite all that, Vladimir Putin’s Russia brutally invaded Ukraine, ensuring the release of yet more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere as, among other things, various European countries were forced to turn to greater coal use. Meanwhile, the U.S. and China, the two largest greenhouse gas emitters, are now heading into what’s being called, without the slightest sense of irony, a “new cold war.” In the process, responding to House Majority Leader Nancy Pelosi’s decision to visit Taiwan, China recently suspended planned climate talks between the two countries.

Today, TomDispatch regular Stan Cox, author of The Green New Deal and Beyond: Ending the Climate Emergency While We Still Can, explores just what it means, in climate terms, for the U.S., no matter the administration, to pour ever more taxpayer dollars into the Pentagon and the rest of the national security state. Yes, it’s long been commonplace to claim that war is hell (and if you don’t believe that, just check out the nightmare in Ukraine right now). One thing should be ever clearer: sadly enough, that way of life is now all too literally the path to hell. Let Cox explain. Tom

The Nightmare of Military Spending on an Overheating Planet – A Big Carbon Bootprint and a Giant Sucking Sound in the National Budget

On October 1st, the U.S. military will start spending the more than $800 billion Congress is going to provide it with in fiscal year 2023. And that whopping sum will just be the beginning. According to the calculations of Pentagon expert William Hartung, funding for various intelligence agencies, the Department of Homeland Security, and work on nuclear weaponry at the Energy Department will add another $600 billion to what you, the American taxpayer, will be spending on national security.

That $1.4 trillion for a single year dwarfs Congress’s one-time provision of approximately $300 billion under the recently passed Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) for what’s called “climate mitigation and adaptation.” And mind you, that sum is to be spent over a number of years. In contrast to the IRA, which was largely a climate bill (even if hardly the best version of one), this country’s military spending bills are distinctly anti-human, anti-climate, and anti-Earth. And count on this: Congress’s military appropriations will, in all too many ways, cancel out the benefits of its new climate spending.

Here are just the three most obvious ways our military is an enemy of climate mitigation. First, it produces huge quantities of greenhouse gases, while wreaking other kinds of ecological havoc. Second, when the Pentagon does take climate change seriously, its attention is almost never focused on reducing greenhouse gas emissions but on preparing militarily for a climate-changed world, including the coming crisis of migration and future climate-induced armed conflicts globally. And third, our war machine wastes hundreds of billions of dollars annually that should instead be spent on climate mitigation, along with other urgent climate-related needs.

The Pentagon’s Carbon Bootprint

The U.S. military is this globe’s largest institutional consumer of petroleum fuels. As a result, it produces greenhouse gas emissions equal to about 60 million metric tons of carbon dioxide annually. Were the Pentagon a country, those figures would place it just below Ireland and Finland in a ranking of national carbon emissions. Or put another way, our military surpasses the total national emissions of Bulgaria, Croatia, and Slovenia combined.

A lot of those greenhouse gases flow from the construction, maintenance, and use of its 800 military bases and other facilities on 27 million acres across the United States and the world. The biggest source of emissions from actual military operations is undoubtedly the burning of jet fuel. A B-2 bomber, for instance, emits almost two tons of carbon dioxide when flying a mere 50 miles, while the Pentagon’s biggest boondoggle, the astronomically costly F-35 combat aircraft, will emit “only” one ton for every 50 miles it flies.

Those figures come from “Military- and Conflict-Related Emissions,” a June 2022 report by the Perspectives Climate Group in Germany. In it, the authors express regret for the optimism they had exhibited two decades earlier when it came to the reduction of global military greenhouse gas emissions and the role of the military in experimenting with new, clean forms of energy:

In the process of us writing this report and looking at our article written 20 years ago, the initial notion of assessing military activities… as potential ‘engines of progress’ for novel renewable technologies was shattered by the Iraq War, followed by the horror of yet another large-scale ground war, this time in Europe… All our attention should be directed towards achieving the 1.5° target [of global temperature rise beyond the preindustrial level set at the Paris Climate Agreement in 2015]. If we fail in this endeavor, the repercussions will be more deadly than all conflicts we have witnessed in the last decades.

In March, the Defense Department announced that its proposed budget for fiscal year 2023 would include a measly $3.1 billion for “addressing the climate crisis.” That amounts to less than 0.4% of the department’s total spending and, as it happens, two-thirds of that little sliver of funding will go not to climate mitigation itself but to protecting military facilities and activities against the future impact of climate change. Worse yet, only a tiny portion of the remainder would go toward reducing the greenhouse-gas emissions or other environmental damage the armed forces itself will produce.

In a 2021 Climate Adaptation Plan, the Pentagon claimed, however vaguely, that it was aiming for a future in which it could “operate under changing climate conditions, preserving operational capability, and enhancing the natural and manmade systems essential to the Department’s success.” It projected that “in worst-case scenarios, climate-change-related impacts could stress economic and social conditions that contribute to mass migration events or political crises, civil unrest, shifts in the regional balance of power, or even state failure. This may affect U.S. national interests directly or indirectly, and U.S. allies or partners may request U.S. assistance.”

Sadly enough, however, as far as the Pentagon is concerned, an overheated world will only open up further opportunities for the military. In a classic case of projection, its analysts warn that “malign actors may try to exploit regional instability exacerbated by the impacts of climate change to gain influence or for political or military advantage.” (Of course, Americans would never act in such a manner since, by definition, the Pentagon is a benign actor, but will have to respond accordingly.)

The CIA and other intelligence agencies seem to share the Pentagon’s vision of our hotter future as a growth opportunity. A 2021 climate risk assessment by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) paid special attention to the globe’s fastest-warming region, the Arctic. Did it draw the intelligence community’s interest because of the need to prevent a meltdown of the planet’s ice caps if the Earth is to remain a livable place for humanity? What do you think?

In fact, its authors write revealingly of the opportunities, militarily speaking, that such a scenario will open up as the Arctic melts:

Arctic and non-Arctic states almost certainly will increase their competitive activities as the region becomes more accessible because of warming temperatures and reduced ice. … Military activity is likely to increase as Arctic and non-Arctic states seek to protect their investments, exploit new maritime routes, and gain strategic advantages over rivals. The increased presence of China and other non-Arctic states very likely will amplify concerns among Arctic states as they perceive a challenge to their respective security and economic interests.

In other words, in an overheated future, a new “cold” war will no longer be restricted to what were once the more temperate parts of the planet.

If, in climate change terms, the military worries about anything globally, it’s increased human migration from devastated areas like today’s flood-ridden Pakistan, and the conflicts that could come with it. In cold bureaucratese, that DNI report predicted that, as ever more of us (or rather, in national security state terms, of them) begin fleeing heat, droughts, floods, and tropical cyclones, “Displaced populations will increasingly demand changes to international refugee law to consider their claims and provide protection as climate migrants or refugees, and affected populations will fight for legal payouts for loss and damages resulting from climate effects.” Translation: We won’t pay climate reparations and we won’t pay to help keep other peoples’ home climates livable, but we’re more than willing to spend as much as it takes to block them from coming here, no matter the resulting humanitarian nightmares.

Is It Finally Time to Defund War?

Along with the harm caused by its outsized greenhouse gas emissions and its exploitation of climate chaos as an excuse for imperialism, the Pentagon wreaks terrible damage by soaking up trillions of dollars in government funds that should have gone to meet all-too-human needs, mitigate climate change, and repair the ecological damage the Pentagon itself has caused in its wars in this century.

Months before Russia invaded Ukraine, ensuring that yet more greenhouse gases would be pumped into our atmosphere, a group of British scholars lamented the Biden administration’s enthusiasm for military funding. They wrote that, “rather than scaling back military spending to pay for urgent climate-related spending, initial budget requests for military appropriations are actually increasing even as some U.S. foreign adventures are supposedly coming to a close.” It’s pointless, they suggested, “to tinker around the edges of the U.S. war machine’s environmental impact.” The funds spent “procuring and distributing fuel across the U.S. empire could instead be spent as a peace dividend [that] includes significant technology transfer and no-strings-attached funding for adaptation and clean energy to those countries most vulnerable to climate change.”

Washington could still easily afford that “peace dividend,” were it to begin cutting back on its military spending. And don’t forget that, at past climate summits, the rich nations of this planet pledged to send $100 billion annually to the poorest ones so that they could develop their renewable energy capacity, while preparing for and adapting to climate change. All too predictably, the deep-pocketed nations, including the U.S., have stonewalled on that pledge. And of course, as the recent unprecedented monsoon flooding of one-third of Pakistan — a country responsible for less than 1% of historic global greenhouse gases — suggests, it’s already remarkably late for that skimpy promise of a single hundred billion dollars; hundreds of billions per year are now needed. Mind you, Congress could easily divert enough from the Pentagon’s annual budget alone to cover its part of the global climate-reparations tab. And that should be only the start of a wholesale shift toward peacetime spending. No such luck, of course.

As the National Priorities Project (NPP) has pointed out, increases in national security funding alone in 2022 could have gone a long way toward supporting Joe Biden’s expansive Build Back Better bill, which failed in Congress that year. That illustrates yet again how, as William Hartung put it, “almost anything the government wants to do other than preparing for or waging war involves a scramble for funding, while the Department of Defense gets virtually unlimited financial support,” often, in fact, more than it even asks for.

The Democrats’ bill, which would have provided solid funding for renewable energy development, child care, health care, and help for economically stressed families was voted down in the Senate by all 50 Republicans and one Democrat (yes, that guy) who claimed that the country couldn’t afford the bill’s $170 billion-per-year price tag. However, in the six months that followed, as the NPP notes, Congress pushed through increases in military funding that added up to $143 billion — almost as much as Build Back Better would have cost per year!

As Pentagon experts Hartung and Julia Gledhill commented recently, Congress is always pulling such stunts, sending more money to the Defense Department than it even requested. Imagine how much crucial federal action on all kinds of issues could be funded if Congress began deeply cutting, rather than inflating, the cash it shovels out for war and imperialism.

Needed: A Merger of Movements

Various versions of America’s antiwar movement have been trying to confront this country’s militarism since the days of the Vietnam War with minimal success. After all, Pentagon budgets, adjusted for inflation, are as high as ever. And, not coincidentally, greenhouse gas emissions from both the military and this society as a whole remain humongous. All these years later, the question remains: Can anything be done to impede this country’s money-devouring, carbon-spewing military juggernaut?

For the past twenty years, CODEPINK, a women-led grassroots organization, has been one of the few national groups deeply involved in both the antiwar and climate movements. Jodie Evans, one of its cofounders, told me recently that she sees a need for “a whole new movement intersecting the antiwar movement with the climate movement.” In pursuit of that very goal, she said, CODEPINK has organized a project called Cut the Pentagon. Here’s how she describes it: “It’s a coalition of groups serving issues of people’s needs and the planet’s needs and the anti-war movement, because all of us have an interest in cutting the war machine. We launched it on September 12th last year, after 20 years of a ‘War on Terror’ that took $21 trillion of our tax money, to destroy the planet, to destroy the Middle East, to destroy our communities, to turn peacekeeping police into warmongering police.” Cut the Pentagon, says Evans, has “been doing actions in [Washington] D.C. pretty much nonstop since we launched it.”

Sadly, in 2022, both the climate and antiwar struggles face the longest of odds, going up against this country’s most formidable strongholds of wealth and power. But CODEPINK is legendary for finding creative ways of getting in the face of the powerful interests it opposes and nonviolently upending business-as-usual. “As an activist for the last 50 some-odd years,” Evans says, “I always felt my job was to make power uncomfortable, and to disrupt it.” But since the start of the Covid pandemic, she adds, “Power is making us more uncomfortable than we are making it. It’s stronger and more weaponized than it has been before in my lifetime.”

Among the hazards of this situation, she adds, social movements that manage to grow and become effective often find themselves coopted and, she adds, over the past two decades, “Too many of us got lazy… We thought ‘clicktivism’ creates change, but it doesn’t.” Regarding an education bill early in the Trump administration, “We had 200 million messages going into Congress from a vast coalition, and we lost. Then a month later, we had only 2,000 people, but we were right there in the halls of Congress and we saved Obamacare. Members of Congress don’t like being uncomfortable.”

As the military-industrial complex and Earth-killing capitalism only seem to grow ever mightier, Evans and CODEPINK continue pushing for action in Washington. And recently, she believes, a window has been opening:

For the first time since the sixties and early seventies, it feels like a lot of people are seeing through the propaganda, really being willing to create new structures and new forms. We need to go where both our votes and our voices matter. Creating local change — that’s our work. Our divest-from-war campaigns are all local. Folks who care about the planet need to figure out how do we make power uncomfortable… It’s not a fight of words. It’s a fight of being.

The major crises we now face are so deeply entangled that perhaps grassroots efforts to face them might, in the end, coalesce. The question remains: From the neighborhood to the nation, could movements for climate mitigation and justice, Indigenous sovereignty, Black lives, economic democracy, and, crucially, an end to the American form of militarism merge into a single collective wave? Our future may depend on it.

Stan Cox, Angry White Guys in Big-Ass Pickups

As gun sales in this country soar — another 43 million weapons bought in 2020 and 2021 alone — while the possession of military-style weaponry is normalized, whether in mass killings or everyday life, American politics, too, is becoming weaponized. If you doubt that, then you weren’t in that Comfort Inn room where, on the night of January 5, 2021, a group of Oath Keeper militiamen stored their weapons so that a “quick reaction force” could potentially transport them to the Capitol the next day.

In the end, as far as we know, none of those weapons made it that January 6th, but others certainly did, as the House January 6th committee made all too clear in its recent hearings. Worse yet, the president of the United States knew perfectly well that some of those he was encouraging to march on the Capitol to protest (or even reverse) his election loss were armed. In political terms, red states have been easing gun laws even as some blue states are cracking down. In California, which has among the nation’s strictest laws (especially when it comes to assault rifles), deaths from guns are approximately 40% below the national average — not that such figures, it seems, matter to most Republicans.

The result: an unequally armed nation at a moment where the weaponizing of our political system seems on the rise. As right-wing extremism grows and guns become ever more commonplace in American life, while the death toll from them soars, the idea that arms, not votes, might someday define the endpoint of an American election is also being normalized.

Oh, and my mistake, I forgot to include in the above description one of the ways in which this country is weaponizing big time. Fortunately, TomDispatch regular Stan Cox didn’t. So, sit back, watch out for the smoke and fumes, and let him explain. Tom

Three Tons of Fascism with a Bull Bar Fuming at the Rest of Us, Democracy, and the Earth

In the United States during 16 months in 2020 and 2021, vehicles rammed into groups of protesters at least 139 times, according to a Boston Globe analysis. Three victims died and at least 100 were injured. Consider that a new level of all-American barbarity, thanks to the growing toxicity of right-wing politics, empowered by its embrace of ever-larger, more menacing vehicles being cranked out by the auto industry.

And keep this in mind: attacks on street protests are just the most recent development in fossil-fuelized aggression. Especially in the red states of America, MAGA motorists have been driving our quality of life into the ground for years. My spouse Priti Gulati Cox and I live half a block south of Crawford Street, the central east-west artery in Salina, Kansas. Starting in the early Trump years, and ever more regularly during the pandemic, we’ve been plagued by the brain-rattling roar of diesel-powered pickup trucks as they peel out of side streets onto Crawford, spewing black exhaust and aiming to go from zero to sixty before reaching the traffic light at Broadway. By 2020, many of these drivers were regularly festooning their pickups, ISIS-style, with giant flags bearing slogans like “Trump 2020” and “Don’t Tread on Me,” as well as Confederate battle flags. Some still display them, often with “F*** Biden” flags as well.

If you live in flyover country as we do, you come to expect such performances. And don’t think that I’m just expressing my own personal annoyance about an aesthetic affront either. Fueled by diesel or gasoline, and supercharged by what political scientist Cara Daggett has labeled “petro-masculinity,” those men in big, loud vehicles serve as the shock troops for a white-right authoritarian movement that threatens to seize control of our political system. Recall the “Trump caravan” that tried to run a Biden campaign bus off the road in Texas just before Election Day 2020. Or the “Trump Trains” of pickups carrying men with paintball guns, one of which attacked Black Lives Matter protesters in Portland, Oregon.

Long forgotten now by most of us, those hapless North American truck convoys, some of which converged on Washington, D.C., last spring, might as well have been scripted by the writers of Seinfeld. To all appearances, they were protests about nothing — other than a vague sense of grievance personified (or truckified). Still, the drivers did manage to cause serious mayhem, assaulting the residents of two capitals, Ottawa and Washington, with diesel fumes, daylong horn blasting, and bellicose conduct. They paralyzed downtown Ottawa for almost a month (and cost the government there more than $36 million). Some drivers in the cross-country U.S. convoys physically assaulted counter-protesters, cyclists, and motorists. There was one bright spot, though: one day, a man on a cargo bike got in front of a line of semi-cabs and pickups and slow-pedaled through Washington’s narrow side streets, leaving the invaders no alternative but to creep along behind him for what seemed like forever and a day.

The convoy truckers, however, paid little price for the havoc they caused. Indeed, vehicular aggression and violence increasingly goes unpunished. On June 24th in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, a man aimed his pickup truck at a group of women protesting that morning’s Supreme Court decision reversing Roe v. Wade. When his vehicle first came into contact with them, the women stood fast, and grabbed its bull bar — the steel armoring designed to protect the grille against livestock, but used more often these days to intimidate humans. With a yell, he plowed ahead, driving over one woman’s ankle and giving another a concussion. When the police arrived, they interviewed the driver, but they have yet to charge him or even identify him publicly. He was probably shielded by a law the Iowa legislature passed in 2020 immunizing drivers who run into or over protesters, if they simply claim to have been fleeing in fear. Ominously enough, Florida and Oklahoma have passed similar laws essentially encouraging such acts.

Are You What You Drive?

Here in the heartland, white nationalism feeds on gas, gunpowder, oil, and testosterone. Ranchers, wheat-growers, oilfield roughnecks, firefighters, loggers, hunters — in short, the very kinds of guys who populate today’s ads for pickup trucks — are widely viewed as the real Americans. Most pickups today, however, are found not out on the range but on city streets and Interstate highways, sporting empty beds and clean tires, with their drivers settled into cushy captain’s seats. For many of them, big pickups are no more than a non-utilitarian cultural statement and, in today’s culture, that means a political statement, too. (With so many luxury options on offer, a new truck can also be an extravagant statement, since their average price now exceeds $60,000.)

When I was reading High and Mighty, Keith Bradsher’s classic book on SUVs, in the early 2000s, there was as yet no correlation between the supersizing of personal vehicles and political preferences. It was mostly about armoring up against crashes and crime. A few years later, when even more bloated trucks and SUVs with abundant creature comforts started being advertised as “living rooms on wheels,” they still had no strong political associations. Over the past few years, however, manufacturers have begun capitalizing on MAGA-world belligerence by pumping up the road-ruling mystique of those vehicles. On this topic, I won’t even try to match the bracing prose of Angie Schmitt, the author of Right of Way: Race, Class, and the Silent Epidemic of Pedestrian Deaths in America, who wrote for Bloomberg News last year:

Pickup truck front ends have warped into scowling brick walls, billboards for outwardly directed hostility… [T]he height of the truck’s front end may reach a grown man’s shoulders or neck… That aesthetic can be detected not only in the raised ‘militarized’ grille height of pickup trucks, but also the popularity of aftermarket modifications like blacked-out windows and ‘bull bars’ affixed to the front end.

Some pickups and full-size SUVs now approach the dimensions of World War II-era tanks and are advertised accordingly. Ford used the term “military-grade, aluminum-alloy” five times in a single press release for its F-150 pickup. This supersizing, as well as armoring, has had predictable results. For example, in another article, Schmitt observed that:

Passenger and driver deaths have remained mostly stable over the past decade while pedestrian fatalities have risen by about 50 percent. From 2019 to 2020, pedestrian deaths per vehicle miles traveled increased a record 21 percent, for a total of 6,721 fatalities. This astonishing death toll has multiple causes, but the scale of the front end of many pickup trucks and SUVs is part of the problem, and that’s been obvious for quite a while.

The politicization of big-box personal vehicles is now almost complete. By the 2020 election campaign season, few drivers, left or right, needed bumper stickers to tell the world which candidates they supported. A month before the election, Forbes summarized survey data illustrating the relationship between party affiliation and vehicle ownership. Of the models most disproportionately preferred by Democrats, liberals, and progressives, 14 were sedans or crossovers, three were trucks or full-size SUVs, and two were hybrid or electric vehicles. The Honda Civic sedan topped the list.

I’m sure at this point you won’t be surprised to learn that the vehicle preferences for Republicans and other conservatives were almost exactly the reverse of that. Of their top model preferences, 14 were trucks or full-size SUVs while only three were sedans or crossovers. None were hybrids or electric vehicles. Those with the strongest Republican/conservative associations were the Ford F-250 and Ram 2500 pickups, both weighing in at more than 6,000 pounds.

“Pollution Porn”

A couple of weeks before the 2020 election, Priti and I were cruising south along Santa Fe Avenue, the main street in downtown Salina. As we approached Crawford, we saw that a long, noisy Trump train was passing through the intersection, headed west. Decked out with flags, balloons, and other regalia, the parade of trucks stretched out of sight in both directions. When a temporary gap opened in the queue, we took a right turn toward home. In this way, our 2006 Civic hybrid (I know — too trite) involuntarily joined the procession. With a huge, flag-bedecked tailgate towering over our windshield, a five-foot-high bull bar looming in the rearview mirror, and a cacophony of horns drowning out our laughter, we crept home, where we bailed out of the parade. Though we faced no hostility ourselves, that was probably because the drivers on either side of us could barely see us.

Compared with many of the 2020 Trump trains, Salina’s version proved remarkably mild-mannered. But all such white-right parades, including the farcical “Boaters for Trump” regattas, also manage to do a remarkable job of making a relatively small number of Americans seem like a big crowd. There were far more people in Salina’s 2020 Black Lives Matter march than in that truck parade. But when you surround a modest number of people with tons of steel and aluminum propelled by loud internal-combustion engines, you’ve got an impressive spectacle in an ominous sort of way. The forests of flags only add to the fascist aura that surrounds the political use of such hulking vehicles.

Until James Alex Fields, Jr., drove his Dodge Challenger into a non-violent group of protesters in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017, killing Heather Heyer, the tactic of crashing into crowds was best known as a terror tool used by Islamic State sympathizers, primarily in Europe. At the time, the means of aggression preferred by American pick-up drivers was something called “rollin’ coal.” It involved modifying a truck’s fuel system so that the driver could blast large clouds of thick, black diesel smoke from its tailpipes or smokestacks.

Often, coal-rollin’ was pure performance, a display of rebellion against anything in the culture that smacked of concern for climate change. It was, as Vocativ labeled it in 2014, “pollution porn.” But even then, under the surface was the potential for so much worse. In recent years, more aggressive drivers have taken that stunt to its logical conclusion by engulfing pedestrians, cyclists, electric vehicle or hybrid drivers, and other perceived enemies in toxic black clouds.

As Cara Daggett put it:

A lot of things are attached to fossil fuel culture because they are symbolically a part of a certain way of life or an identity. It’s no longer possible to operate in the world and not understand that fossil fuels are violent. [Rollin’ coal is] a kind of spectacular performance of power.

Psychology professor Joshua Nelson suggests that such an extravagant, showy combustion of fuel represents an attempt by white male drivers in particular to compensate for two new realities – that men like them can no longer feel they’re part of an all-powerful American clan and that what awaits us all, however hard it may be to express, however much they may want to repress the very idea, is impending doom from fossil fuels destroying this planet. As Nelson puts it:

There is nothing more possibly traumatizing (and requiring psychologically defensive operations) than potential global destruction and annihilation, especially when one is forced to consider [his] own role in this impending apocalyptic disaster.

Whether such “psychologically defensive operations” grow out of a sense of guilt, inadequacy, or something else entirely, they play out the same way — as aggression against the rest of us.

Standing Up to the Men in Trucks

One characteristic news photo from the violent conflicts of recent times — whether in Afghanistan, Libya, Nigeria, Syria, or elsewhere — has been of pickup trucks loaded with armed men. The U.S. hasn’t made it there — not yet anyway. But it’s hard to doubt that (thank you, Donald Trump!) ever since January 6, 2021, when so many right-wing militia members broke into the Capitol, some of them armed, we’ve been living through an attempted takeover of our country by members of one of the two major parties. And in 2022, it will hardly surprise you to know that its supporters own more guns and trucks than the rest of us.

This fits with trends pointed out by Rachel Kleinfeld, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. She’s studied the use of violence by a growing number of political parties in a wide range of countries and is now tracking America’s upsurge in militia activity, too. She recently wrote, “Even if Trump passes from the scene, the embrace of violence and intimidation as a political tactic by a faction of the GOP will cause violence of all types to rise — against all Americans.”

Ultra-MAGA elements in legislatures and the courts are already gutting our right to preserve a livable climate, ensure reproductive rights, and vote, even as they create new rights to own weapons of war and put them to deadly use. Usually, those weapons are AR-15s or other firearms, but they can also be tank-scale personal vehicles wrapped in military-grade alloy, with an armored front end.

Big trucks, aggressively driven, straddle the borderline between a democracy in crisis and a country (and world) facing a climate emergency of the first order. They guzzle fuel, spew pollution, and degrade our quality of life. With the paramilitary wing of the anti-democracy, anti-Earth GOP at the wheel, such vehicles portend even worse environmental harm to come. If the far right prevails, its politicos will choke off any state or federal efforts to phase out fossil fuels. If, using means legal or not, they consolidate their power over the Supreme Court, Congress in 2022, and the White House in 2024, they will be spewing the political version of rollin’ coal and are guaranteed to smother the possibility of climate action, probably long enough to make runaway global heating inevitable.

Keeping the anti-democracy party out of power will require massive get-out-the-vote efforts in 2022 and 2024, and record-breaking turnouts in the streets will undoubtedly be needed as well. In truth, there are many more of us than of the fascist wannabes in this country. Like the brave women in Cedar Rapids, we must neither surrender the public square to the extremists nor allow them to bestow rights on vehicles and fossil fuels while revoking rights that belong to us and to the rest of nature.

In case you hadn’t noticed, we live on an eternally well-oiled and well-gased planet. Only recently, for instance, Joe Biden announced that the U.S. was going to ramp up the supplies of frozen liquid natural gas (LNG) it sends to Europe by 15 billion cubic meters in response to the invasion of Ukraine and the sanctions on Russia that followed. That’s a lot of gas and, as a result, it looks like new LNG terminals will be opened in the Gulf of Mexico in the coming years. Hooray! The U.S., it seems, will be a fossil-fuel exporter until the end of time. The only sad news: the end of time may come sooner than we think.

In 2022, our choices on this planet seem increasingly clear and grim: blow it up, burn it up (or both). Yes, there have been increasing worries that, pushed against the wall by his failing invasion of Ukraine, Vladimir Putin might turn to his nuclear arsenal in some fashion. Only recently, both Dmitry Medvedev, the deputy chairman of Russia’s security council, and its defense minister spoke openly about that possibility. Medvedev specifically insisted that, under certain circumstances, his country, which has the largest nuclear stockpile on the planet, might indeed consider the first use of such weaponry. As he put it, that would be in response to “an act of aggression… committed against Russia and its allies, which jeopardized the existence of the country itself, even without the use of nuclear weapons, that is, with the use of conventional weapons.” In other words, nuclear weapons are again in play on planet Earth, but when it comes to ultimate destruction, what isn’t?

Sadly enough, Putin and crew are in good company when it comes to preparing for planetary annihilation. After all, this country is now engaged in a three-decade-long “modernization” of its own nuclear arsenal at the cost of at least $1.7 trillion. And more generally, the Biden administration is responding to the new Cold War by preparing to ramp up the “defense budget” to a monumental $813.3 billion in 2023 — and that, keep in mind, is before Congress even gets the chance, as they did last year, to hike it further. In fact, a group of 40 House and Senate Republicans is already lobbying for more!

Meanwhile, the globe’s biggest arms dealer is preparing to sell yet more weaponry to a Saudi regime that the president called a “pariah” while running for office, a country waging a war in Yemen (for which sanctions are unimaginable) whose cruelty and brutality outweigh even the horror now taking place in Ukraine. So, war is increasingly well-oiled, while when it comes to oil and natural gas, let TomDispatch regular Stan Cox, author of The Path to a Livable Future: A New Politics to Fight Climate Change, Racism, and the Next Pandemic, fill you in on the fix in which we find ourselves. With Europe embroiled in a new war and the planet heating up ever more rapidly (check out the latest melting news from Antarctica, for example), he suggests where, if we were in a saner world, we might indeed head from here. If only… Tom

How Not to Cope with Vladimir Putin by Drilling and Pumping – A Bipartisan Oil Rush or the Phasing Out of Fossil Fuels?

While the Ukrainian people bear the lethal brunt of Russia’s invasion, shockwaves from that war threaten to worsen other crises across the planet. The emergency that loomed largest before Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine began — the heating of the Earth’s climate — is now looming larger still. The reason is simple enough: a war-induced rush to boost oil and gas production has significantly undercut efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres made that clear in an angry March 21st address blasting world leaders scrambling for yet more oil and gas. “Countries could become so consumed by the immediate fossil-fuel supply gap that they neglect or knee-cap policies to cut fossil-fuel use,” he said, adding, “This is madness.” He linked obsessive fuel burning with the endpoint toward which today’s clash of world powers could be pushing us, using a particularly frightening term from the original Cold War. “Addiction to fossil fuels is,” he warned, “mutually assured destruction.”

He’s right. In this all-too-MAD moment, we’re facing increasingly intertangled threats of the first order and can’t keep looking away. To achieve mutually assured protection against both global broiling and global war, humanity will have to purge oil, natural gas, and coal from our lives as quickly as possible, a future reality the Ukraine disaster seems to be making less probable by the day.

To Cap Climate Risk, Cap the Wells

When Russia’s invasion of Ukraine sent the cost of a barrel of oil into the triple digits, the fossil-fuel companies and their friends in government, always on the lookout for profitable opportunities amid market chaos, responded predictably.

Oil and gas trade associations in Alaska, North Dakota, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Texas promptly called for even less regulation and more investment in their industry. The Texas association’s president claimed that consumers, now facing steep price hikes at the gas pump, are “feeling the repercussions of canceled pipeline projects, delayed approvals for permits, and the discouragement of additional expansion” and want his industry unleashed. On that point, congressional Republicans couldn’t agree more. In a CNBC op-ed, House minority leader and wannabe speaker Kevin McCarthy called for fast-tracking liquid natural gas exports to NATO countries, issuing drilling leases that the Interior Department has been holding back since last year, and “immediately approving projects such as the Keystone XL pipeline” that President Biden had functionally cancelled by revoking a key cross-border permit.

McCarthy’s fellow Republican Bill Cassidy of Louisiana did him one better. He called for the launching of an “Operation Warp Speed for domestic production of energy.” It would presumably be modeled on the congressionally funded 2020 program to boost Covid-19 vaccine development.

And it wasn’t just the Republicans. The new oil rush is remarkably bipartisan. Senators Marco Rubio (R-FL) and Joe Manchin (D-WV), both acting distinctly in character, declared that oil and natural gas are gifts from God and that He has obliged us to pump and use them in perpetuity. Then there’s the Biden administration. Speaking at a Houston clean-energy roundtable last May, Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm said all the right things about a damaged climate and fossil fuels. Just 10 months later, however, with that boycott of Russian oil already beginning to squeeze the economy, she returned to Houston and pleaded with oil and gas executives to ramp up their production to record levels. At the same time, White House spokesperson Jen Psaki urged those very companies to use the thousands of new drilling permits the administration has issued to “go get more supply out of the ground” — pronto!

Three days before Guterres’s remarks, the International Energy Agency (IEA) published a 10-point conservation plan to address the oil-supply issue, a welcome antidote to the ever more insistent “drill, baby, drill” policies of U.S. officials. In it, the IEA, an institution no one could mistake for a band of climate activists, recommended reduced speed limits; increased work-from-home arrangements; extra incentives for biking, walking, or taking public transportation; car-free Sundays in cities; ever more carpooling; more rail and less air travel (including deep cuts in business air travel); and other energy-saving policies.

Better yet, most of its proposed measures could be put in place with immediate effect. If that were done, the IEA’s experts estimate that “the advanced economies alone can cut oil demand by 2.7 million barrels a day within the next four months.” That would exceed Russia’s pre-embargo oil exports, helping keep global supply and demand in balance amid the Ukraine war. But even that wouldn’t be enough, given what’s already happening on this planet. For the affluent world to cut its emissions of greenhouse gases rapidly and deeply enough to save us from a climate disaster, government policies would have to go far beyond the measures on that IEA list.

Sadly, decades of procrastination have so narrowed our range of options for heading off climate catastrophe that humanity now faces the necessity of a far steeper mandatory phase-out of fossil fuels as soon as possible. Indeed, the current disruption of world oil and gas markets makes this the optimal time to start driving fossil-fuel use down to zero on an expedited schedule, while ensuring universal, equitable access to affordable (and, as time passes, increasingly renewable) energy.

Unfortunately, the already badly broken 117th Congress has proven incapable of passing any effective climate legislation and so will surely not enact a fossil-fuel phase-out. You would think that the present convergence of catastrophes — a horrific war in Europe, our crippling dependence on fossil fuels, a global climate going haywire, and worsening injustice and inequality across the globe — should be a wake-up call to us all. But no such luck, and the political future in this country looks anything but bright right now with the possibility that the Republicans will take Congress in 2022 and the White House in 2024.

Is the Fossil-Fuel Industry’s Hold on the Economy Only Growing?

Some prominent American figures in the climate movement suggest that the most effective way to react to Russia’s Ukraine war and the rising oil and natural gas prices accompanying it should be, above all else, to accelerate the development of this country’s renewable energy capacity and the electrification that goes with it. While acknowledging the obvious — that wind and solar parks built today won’t save Ukrainian lives or shield American society from economic shocks now or in the near future — they argue that such a renewable energy mobilization could at least reduce our long-term dependence on oil, gas, and coal. In the process, they add, it would strengthen our position against corrupt, violent petro-states like Russia and Saudi Arabia, while reducing the likelihood of future resource wars.

Unfortunately, in this world of ours, that argument puts the cart before the horse. Significant increases in renewable-energy capacity are needed to see us through a decline in fossil-fuel use, but such renewables can’t be relied upon to bring about that decline in time. There’s no reason to believe that such increases in green electric capacity will work fast enough through market forces to drive fossil fuels out of electricity generation, transportation, manufacturing, agriculture, and construction. History and scientific research show that, when such transitions are left to the market, new energy sources mostly go toward increasing the total supply of energy, not displacing older sources of it.

The climate crisis has already reached a point where fossil fuels must be driven out of the energy supply far more quickly than full-scale new energy systems can be developed. The rate of phase-out now required is astonishing. The United Nations Environment Program has estimated that global greenhouse emissions must be reduced by 8% annually, starting immediately, if the heating of the planet is to be held to reasonably tolerable (though still too harsh) levels. In fact, to achieve global equity, affluent nations like the United States would need to phase out their fossil fuels even faster, at perhaps a 10% yearly rate.

As far as I can see, there will be no way to reach that precipitous rate of reduction without pushing fossil fuels out of the economy speedily and directly by law. Only then could renewable energy development, electrification, efficiency, and, crucially, deep reductions in the wasteful production of military armaments play their crucial roles in helping us compensate for the shrinking of fossil-fuel supplies.

Policies of that sort were, of course, absent from Washington’s agenda even before all eyes turned (as they should have) toward supporting the Ukrainians, while being careful not to set in motion a cascade of events that could lead to World War III. Unfortunately, if Armageddon is indeed forestalled and the war ends with the world outside Ukraine about the same as it was, my fear is that Congress and the White House will have even less stomach for phasing out fossil fuels than they did before. It’s more likely that this destabilizing episode will further strengthen the fossil-fuel industry’s hold on our economy, leading only to increased carbon emissions.

Still, it’s crucial that, in the years to come, those of us who see the situation for what it is keep pushing for an ever-faster fuel phase-out, because a late start will be so much better than no start at all. Climate researchers are stressing that for every tenth of a degree of eventual heating that we prevent, future generations will see less ecological devastation and human suffering.

Is There a Path to Phase-Out? Well…

How would our economy and society change if we did commit to phasing out oil, gas, and coal and adapting to dwindling fuel supplies in a just and equitable way? Based on America’s history of grappling with energy shortages in the 1940s and 1970s, as well as the growing amount of research on supply-side restraint, here’s my stab at describing policies that could achieve just such goals.

First, because the fossil-fuel industry would never truly cooperate with a statutory phase-out of the very products it sells so profitably, it would have to be nationalized. This isn’t as radical as it sounds. In fact, there’s a great American tradition of nationalization. Repeatedly in wartime, Washington has taken control of critical resources and industries to scale up production of essential goods or halt unwanted production. Episodes of nationalization have even occurred in peacetime, as for instance with the takeover of more than 1,000 savings and loan institutions during the 1980s financial crisis.

Operating under federal law, the newly nationalized fossil-fuel industry would place caps on the numbers of barrels of oil, cubic feet of gas, and tons of coal allowed out of the ground and into the economy annually. Those caps would then be ratcheted down quickly, year by year, until extraction rates and therefore greenhouse-gas emissions were driven close to zero.

Such rapidly declining caps would provide the strongest possible incentive for building renewable-energy capacity and improving energy conservation and efficiency. Fuels and probably other resources would also have to be reallocated for the production of essential goods and services. For example, the massive flow of resources that now goes to the military-industrial complex could be mostly diverted toward building renewable infrastructure and, in the process, provide far more genuine “national security” for this country.

Like today’s disruption of global oil markets, a future phase-out of fossil fuels would indeed push energy costs up. In both cases, the best remedy would be to keep energy affordable through price controls and rationing to ensure sufficient, equitable energy access for all. Price controls and rationing were used this way with much success during World War II. Indeed, if such rationing had been employed during the energy crisis of the 1970s, it could have prevented the endless gas station queues and the resulting misery for which that decade is now mostly remembered. Back then, gas rationing drew bipartisan support. For example, both President Jimmy Carter and conservative columnist George F. Will called for it. But by the time Carter’s standby gas-rationing plan was finally passed by Congress in 1980, it was too late to help.

Today, as enthusiasm for a carbon tax wanes, climate proposals like cap-and-ration that directly target the fossil-fuel industry while protecting everyone’s access to energy are gaining broader support. In a 2020 Data for Progress poll, for instance, almost 40% of Americans supported the nationalization of the fossil-fuel industry, while such backing hit 50% or more among those under 45 and Black respondents.

Similarly, more than 2,700 scientists and researchers have signed a letter urging the adoption of a Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty. Think of it as a global version of just such a declining cap. (A similar international effort is called Cap Global Carbon). Meanwhile, in both North America and Europe, more leading climate scientists, scholars, and activists have begun advocating for nationalization, declining caps, just-resource allocation, price controls, and rationing. (In a recent essay recommending such policies, Richard Heinberg of the Post-Carbon Institute provided an impressive list of people and groups pushing such an agenda.)

None of this will happen, however, as long as a political minority, backed by powerful economic forces that fiercely oppose any action on climate, controls a country in which pathetic or nonexistent public transportation systems force a continuing deep dependence on the private vehicle. To make matters worse, as the Covid-19 pandemic showed so devastatingly, a militant minority of Americans fanatically devoted to individual “freedom” can effectively veto policies that promote the common good or even, in the case of climate change, the very possibility of living a reasonable life on this Earth.

Nevertheless, whatever the limitations of our moment, it’s important to plant some markers out there on the horizon of possibilities. That’s the only way to show just how deep the policies needed to ensure our collective survival must go, however abhorrent they may be to those in power. In times like these, when the stakes are higher than ever, we have to push even harder for those markers and maybe get at least a little closer to some of them.

This month will mark a critical juncture in the struggle to avoid climate catastrophe. At the COP26 global climate summit kicking off next week in Glasgow, Scotland, negotiators will be faced with the urgent need to get the world economy off the business-as-usual track that will take the Earth up to and beyond 3 degrees Celsius of excess heating before this century's end, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Yet so far, the pledges of rich nations to cut greenhouse-gas emissions have been far too weak to rein in the temperature rise. Meanwhile, the Biden administration's climate plans hang in the balance. If Congress fails to pass the reconciliation bill, the next opportunity for the United States to take effective climate action may not arise until it's too late.

For the past several decades, Noam Chomsky has been one of the most forceful and persuasive voices confronting injustice, inequity, and the threat posed by human-caused climate chaos to civilization and the Earth. I was eager to know Professor Chomsky's views on the roots of our current dire predicament and on humanity's prospects for emerging from this crisis into a livable future. He very graciously agreed to speak with me by way of a video chat. The text here is an abridged version of a conversation we had on October 1, 2021.

Professor Chomsky, now 92, is the author of numerous best-selling political works, translated into scores of languages. His critiques of power and advocacy on behalf of the political agency of the common person have inspired generations of activists and organizers. He has been institute professor emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology since 1976. His most recent books are Consequences of Capitalism: Manufacturing Discontent and Resistance, with Marv Waterstone, and Climate Crisis and the Global Green New Deal: The Political Economy of Saving the Planet, with Robert Pollin and C.J. Polychroniou.

— Stan Cox

Stan Cox: Most of the nations that will be meeting in Glasgow for the 26th UN Climate Change Conference on October 31-November 12, 2021, have made emissions-reduction pledges. For the most part, those pledges are wholly inadequate. What principles do you think should guide the effort to prevent climate catastrophe?

Noam Chomsky: The initiators of the Paris Agreement intended to have a binding treaty, not voluntary agreements, but there was an impediment. It's called the Republican Party. It was clear that the Republican Party would never accept any binding commitments. The Republican organization, which has lost any pretense of being a normal political party, is almost solely dedicated to the welfare of the super-rich and the corporate sector, and cares absolutely nothing about the population or the future of the world. The Republican organization would never have accepted a treaty. In response, the organizers reduced their goal to a voluntary agreement, which has all the difficulties that you mentioned.

We've lost six years, four under the Trump administration which was openly dedicated to maximizing the use of fossil fuels and dismantling the regulatory apparatus that, to some extent, had limited their lethal effects. To some extent, these regulations protected sectors of the population from pollution, mostly the poor and people of color. But they're the ones who, of course, face the main burden of pollution. It's the poor people of the world who live in what Trump called "shithole countries" that suffer the most; they have contributed the least to the disaster, and they suffer the worst.

It doesn't have to be this way. As you write in your new book, The Path to a Liveable Future, there is indeed a path to a livable future. There are ways to have responsible, sane, and racially just policies. It's up to all of us to demand them, something young people around the world are already doing.

Other countries have their own things to answer for, but the United States has one of the worst records in the world. The United States blocked the Paris Agreement before Trump eventually got into office. But it was under Trump's instructions that the United States pulled out of the agreement altogether.

If you look over at the more sane Democrats, who are far from guiltless, there are people called moderates like Senator Joe Manchin (D–WV), the leading recipient of fossil-fuel funding, whose position is that of the fossil-fuel companies, which is, as he put it, no elimination, just innovation. That's Exxon Mobil's view, too: "Don't worry, we'll take care of you," they say. "We're a soulful corporation. We're investing in some futuristic ways to remove from the atmosphere the pollution that we're pouring into it. Everything's fine, just trust us." No elimination, just innovation, which may or may not come and if it does, it will probably be too late and too limited.

Take the IPCC report that just appeared. It was much more dire than previous ones and said we must eliminate fossil fuels step by step, every year, and be free of them completely within a few decades. A few days after the report was released, Joe Biden issued a plea to the OPEC oil cartel to increase production, which would lower gas prices in the United States and improve his position with the population. There was immediate euphoria in the petroleum journals. There's lots of profit to be made, but at what expense? It was nice to have the human species for a couple of hundred thousand years, but evidently that's long enough. After all, the average lifespan of a species on Earth is apparently around 100,000 years. So why should we break the record? Why organize for a just future for all when we can trash the planet helping rich corporations get richer?

SC: Ecological catastrophe is closing in on us largely because, as you once put it, "the entire socioeconomic system is based on production for profit and a growth imperative that cannot be sustained." However, it seems that only state authority can implement the necessary changes in ways that are equitable, fair, and just. Given the emergency we face, do you think that the U.S. government would be able to justify imposing national-resource constraints like rules for resource allocation or fair-shares rationing, policies that would necessarily limit the freedom of local communities and individuals in their material lives?

NC: Well, we have to face some realities. I would like to see a move towards a more free and just society — production for need rather than production for profit, working people able to control their own lives instead of subordinating themselves to masters for almost their entire waking life. The time required for succeeding at such efforts is simply too great for addressing this crisis. That means we need to solve this within the framework of existing institutions, which can be ameliorated.

The economic system of the last 40 years has been particularly destructive. It's inflicted a major assault on most of the population, resulting in a huge growth in inequality and attacks on democracy and the environment.

A livable future is possible. We don't have to live in a system in which the tax rules have been changed so that billionaires pay lower rates than working people. We don't have to live in a form of state capitalism in which the lower 90% of income earners have been robbed of approximately $50 trillion, for the benefit of a fraction of 1%. That's the estimate of the RAND Corporation, a serious underestimate if we look at other devices that have been used. There are ways of reforming the existing system within basically the same framework of institutions. I think they ought to change, but it would have to be over a longer timescale.

The question is: Can we prevent climate catastrophe within the framework of less savage state capitalist institutions? I think there's a reason to believe that we can, and there are very careful, detailed proposals as to how to do it, including ones in your new book, as well as the proposals of my friend and co-author, economist Robert Pollin, who's worked many of these things out in great detail. Jeffrey Sachs, another fine economist, using somewhat different models, has come to pretty much the same conclusions. These are pretty much along lines of proposals of the International Energy Association, by no means a radical organization, one that grew out of the energy corporations. But they all have essentially the same picture.

There's, in fact, even a congressional resolution by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ed Markey which outlines proposals that are pretty close to this. And I think it's all within the range of feasibility. Their cost estimates of 2% to 3% of GDP, with feasible efforts, would not only address the crisis, but would create a more livable future, one without pollution, without traffic jams, and with more constructive, productive work, better jobs. All of this is possible.

But there are serious barriers — the fossil-fuel industries, the banks, the other major institutions, which are designed to maximize profit and not care about anything else. After all, that was the announced slogan of the neoliberal period — the economic guru Milton Friedman's pronouncement that corporations have no responsibility to the public or to the workforce, that their total responsibility is to maximize profit for the few.

For public-relations reasons, fossil-fuel corporations like ExxonMobil often portray themselves as soulful and benevolent, working day and night for the benefit of the common good. It's called greenwashing.

SC: Some of the most widely discussed methods for capturing and removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere would consume vast quantities of biomass produced on hundreds of millions or billions of acres, thereby threatening ecosystems and food production, largely in low-income, low-emissions nations. A group of ethicists and other scholars recently wrote that a "core principle" of climate justice is that "the urgent, basic needs of poor people and poor countries ought to be secured against the effects of climate change and of measures taken to limit" climate change. That would seem to clearly rule out these "emit carbon now, capture it later" plans, and there are other examples of what we might call "climate-mitigation imperialism." Do you think that the world may be faced with more and more of this sort of exploitation as temperatures rise? And what do you think about these proposals for bioenergy and carbon capture?

NC: It's totally immoral, but it's standard practice. Where does waste go? It doesn't go in your backyard, it goes to places like Somalia that can't protect themselves. The European Union, for example, has been dumping its atomic wastes and other pollution off the coast of Somalia, harming the fishing areas and local industries. It's horrendous.

The latest IPCC report calls for an end to fossil fuels. The hope is that we can avert the worst and reach a sustainable economy within a couple of decades. If we don't do that, we will reach irreversible tipping points and the people most vulnerable — those least responsible for the crisis — will suffer first and most severely from the consequences. People living in the plains of Bangladesh, for example, where powerful cyclones cause extraordinary damage. People living in India, where the temperature can go over 120 degrees Fahrenheit in summer. Many may witness parts of the world becoming unlivable.

There were recent reports by Israeli geoscientists condemning its government for not taking account of the effect of the policies they are pursuing, including developing new gas fields in the Mediterranean. They developed an analysis that indicated that, within a couple of decades, over the summer, the Mediterranean would be reaching the heat of a Jacuzzi, and the low-lying plains would be inundated. People would still live in Jerusalem and Ramallah, but flooding would impact much of the population. Why not change course to prevent this?

SC: The neoclassical economics underlying these injustices lives on in economic climate models known as "integrated assessment models," which come down to cost-benefit analyses based on the so-called social cost of carbon. With these projections, are economists seeking to gamble away the right of future generations to a decent life?

NC: We have no right to gamble with the lives of the people in South Asia, in Africa, or people in vulnerable communities in the United States. You want to do analyses like that in your academic seminar? OK, go ahead. But don't dare translate it into policy. Don't dare to do that.

There's a striking difference between physicists and economists. Physicists don't say, hey, let's try an experiment that might destroy the world, because it would be interesting to see what would happen. But economists do that. On the basis of neoclassical theories, they instituted a major revolution in world affairs in the early 1980s that took off with Carter, and accelerated with Reagan and Thatcher. Given the power of the United States compared with the rest of the world, the neoliberal assault, a major experiment in economic theory, had a devastating result. It didn't take a genius to figure it out. Their motto has been, "Government is the problem."

That doesn't mean you eliminate decisions; it just means you transfer them. Decisions still have to be made. If they're not made by government, which is, in a limited way, under popular influence, they will be made by concentrations of private power, which have no accountability to the public. And following the Friedman instructions, have no responsibility to the society that gave them the gift of incorporation. They have only the imperative of self-enrichment.

Margaret Thatcher then comes along and says there is no such thing as society, just atomized individuals who are somehow managing in the market. Of course, there is a small footnote that she didn't bother to add: for the rich and powerful, there is plenty of society. Organizations like the Chamber of Commerce, the Business Roundtable, ALEC, all kinds of others. They get together, they defend themselves, and so on. There is plenty of society for them, just not for the rest of us. Most people have to face the ravages of the market. And, of course, the rich don't. Corporations count on a powerful state to bail them out every time there's some trouble. The rich have to have the powerful state — as well as its police powers — to be sure nobody gets in their way.

SC: Where do you see hope?

NC: Young people. In September, there was an international climate strike; hundreds of thousands of young people came out to demand an end to environmental destruction. Greta Thunberg recently stood up at the Davos meeting of the great and powerful and gave them a sober talk on what they're doing. "How dare you," she said, "You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words." You have betrayed us. Those are words that should be seared into everyone's consciousness, particularly people of my generation who have betrayed them and continue to betray the youth of the world and the countries of the world.

We now have a struggle. It can be won, but the longer it's delayed, the more difficult it'll be. If we'd come to terms with this ten years ago, the cost would have been much less. If the U.S. hadn't been the only country to refuse the Kyoto Protocol, it would have been much easier. Well, the longer we wait, the more we'll betray our children and our grandchildren. Those are the choices. I don't have many years; others of you do. The possibility for a just and sustainable future exists, and there's plenty that we can do to get there before it's too late.

Copyright 2021 Stan Cox

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Books, John Feffer's new dystopian novel, Songlands (the final one in his Splinterlands series), Beverly Gologorsky's novel Every Body Has a Story, and Tom Engelhardt's A Nation Unmade by War, as well as Alfred McCoy's In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power and John Dower's The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II.

Noam Chomsky is the author of numerous best-selling political works, translated into scores of languages. He has been institute professor emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology since 1976. His most recent books are Consequences of Capitalism: Manufacturing Discontent and Resistance, with Marv Waterstone, and Climate Crisis and the Global Green New Deal: The Political Economy of Saving the Planet, with Robert Pollin and C.J. Polychroniou.

Stan Cox, senior scientist at The Land Institute, is the author of The Path to a Livable Future: A New Politics to Fight Climate Change, Racism, and the Next Pandemic, just published, and The Green New Deal and Beyond: Ending the Climate Emergency While We Still Can, featuring a forward by Noam Chomsky.