DPhil’ing @ODID_QEH @UniofOxford | Just transition @GRI_LSE | Research Director @PalClimateInst 🇵🇸
Climate justice, financialisation, political ecology
it just occurred to me that many people don't know the Digital Library of the Caribbean exists, but you really all should have it bookmarked! it has millions of papers, periodicals, transcripts and entire books from all over the region available for free:
https://t.co/KCHA6Rk0gy
So channel your critique and recall the violence in Latin America under Reagan, in Iraq and Afghanistan under Bush. BUT, invoking China now is at best historically thin, analytically sloppy, and ignorant of the stifling role the US in sino-geopolitics. At worst it is Sinophobia
Honestly baffled and troubled by the amount of counterfactual “What would the U.S. do if China bombed and abducted the Taiwanese president?” being deployed to critique (or deflect from) the U.S.’s reported strike and abduction in Venezuela.
What has happened is NOT a tidy question of hypothetical symmetry, but the exercise of coercive IMPERIAL POWER with 0 constraint and near-total impunity. It shows the hollowness of international law and multilateral governance under conditions of profound power asymmetry.
The United Nations just voted to establish an international day against colonialism in all its forms.
The only countries voting against it:
🇺🇸 The United States
🇮🇱 Israel
I spent sixteen months reporting this story. It was deep, painful, and at times unbearable.
It follows how surveillance tech is rewriting Gaza in real time — and what it’s doing to the people inside it. Read in @NYMag
https://t.co/DBfVVfn4f0
A perfect moment to direct people to one of the most important works of indigenous/marxian political theory which discusses the usage of "recognition" by settler-colonial states (specifically Canada) to contain calls for national sovereignty in their own terms.
🌍 We’re building space for early career researchers from marginalised backgrounds to challenge structural exclusions in climate spaces. 2-day workshop on decolonial & anti-racist praxis...with
@CelineCLTan & many amazing people: Bursaries available:
https://t.co/dyOgfopug4
‼️Sign the statement
This genoc*de and ecoc*de is by design. There's no ecological justice without an absolute dismantling of all facets of fossil capitalist & militarist structures that sustain oppression. Welcome to see debt justice, feminist, diaspora & groups supporting 🍉
"The land is sacred. The genocide is ongoing."
This Eid, we carry both grief and resistance. On Land Day, PICS calls for climate justice that begins with Palestinian liberation.
📝 Read + sign: https://t.co/k4tclrC5QV
You may find it in Arabic and Portuguese up on the site.
the basics: fascism thrives on fear. they want you to be silent, to self-censor, to do less. you will not recover whatever ground you concede. the moment calls for caution, not hysteria. courage, not cowardice. if the objective is fear, be unafraid. dissent.
COP29: Progress or failure? 🌍
Join Oxford's delegation as they unpack the outcomes of COP29—finance, carbon markets, and youth demands—and discuss what’s next for global climate action.
📅 21st Jan | 12.30pm
Register here: https://t.co/L25JMnCCfk
I barely slept.
Here’s best video of what happened yesterday when I confronted Blinken.
Also includes thread of related videos of past deceptions from State Dept.
1/ I'm not sure that ppl outside of California have grasped the magnitude of this deadly and still-escalating wildfire catastrophe. Fires in WUIs, fanned by 80 mph+ winds, bone dry stubble, after 2 yrs of growth in wet winters. Tens of thousands of people are being evacuated.
No filmmaker, writer or artist should ever have to tell the story of their own extermination. Yet 22 courageous Palestinian filmmakers found a way to film their story this past year in Gaza using whatever tools they could pull from the rubble of their homes and cities. The extraordinary film FROM GROUND ZERO — for which I am proud to be an Executive Producer — is the collection of these short films, told all together in under 2 hours. The fact that this film exists at all is a human and cinematic miracle. Go see FROM GROUND ZERO — in theaters now!
Every time I travel around the UK, I am shocked by the severity of uneven development that occurs under capitalism, and disgusted that Britain's leaders allow whole swathes of the country to languish in misery. The suffering is totally needless. It can *easily* be abolished.
So many of the provincial towns in the North of England and Wales are utterly depressed and crumbling. You'll find high streets that are mostly shuttered, infrastructure that is severely degraded, slum-like housing, and ecological wastelands. The people themselves are often depressed, sick and die early deaths.
Why does this happen? Because under capitalism, investment and production is controlled by capital, and capital only mobilizes production when it is profitable to do so. Capital has decided that it is no longer profitable to employ people in these regions, so the communities there are left to decay, the people left in misery, cut off from any access to the prodigious wealth of the nation.
All their talents, their energy, their passion, their labour - all of the abilities they could direct toward improving their communities and their region and the country - all of it is left totally idle, their lives left wasted. Often at most they can hope to be employed by whatever residual capital remains, mostly in the form of pound shops and fast food joints, or perhaps in extractive industries that do not produce anything that benefits the local communities.
But it doesn't have to be this way; the problem can easily be resolved. In a democratic socialist economy, with a strong public finance mechanism and a credit guidance framework, investment and production - the formidable productive capacities of the nation - can be directed toward doing whatever is necessary to improve human lives and ecology.
People in these communities can immediately be hired to undertake meaningful and socially necessary work with living wages, upgrading the housing stock, improving public services, installing renewable energy, creating vibrant community spaces, and so on. Communities, people and ecosystems can be rejuvenated in very short order.
The uneven development that characterizes Britain and most other capitalist countries - where capital and wealth chases profits, concentrates in the major cities, and leaves the peripheries to rot - need not exist. The misery and suffering is totally unnecessary. In a democratic socialist economy, investment can be directed around the country toward what is most needed for people, rather than being limited to only what is most profitable for capital.
The Assad dynasty cultivated a myth of "resistance" against Israel, but for decades, they have used it as a tool to end political life, consolidate power, and fracture society.
My latest with @The_NewArab
https://t.co/valNjCV0sS
Why are poor countries so angry with the #COP29#climate finance deal?
Jodi-Ann Wang from @ODID_QEH explains how the global financial system is systemically skewed against developing countries in @ConversationUK
https://t.co/WPfUyFYZJe
The look on Dr Nkiruka Maduekwe's face at the #COP29 closing session says it all. Allow me to unpack what happened & what we need to do before #COP30 in Belem: "COP29 wasn't about Climate: It's about not disrupting the economic and geopolitical hierarchy"
https://t.co/eApJF8swJg
New goal same mistakes. My take on why the climate finance injustice is only the latest exposé of a rigged system against poor countries. https://t.co/t0iW20HpG0 via @ConversationUK@_TCglobal
T-1 Climate finance #COP29 latest text: standstill on who pays, what types of money, how much. GN countries dancing & rolling out red carpet for private $. No restorative justice/historical responsibilities. Some quick reflections ⬇️ on what paras to protect and what to toss out.