If we made the green energy transition this war would be unthinkable and these authoritarians wouldn’t be in power — not in the US, not in Iran, not in Saudi Arabia, not in Russia. Hydrocarbons are killing our freedom and just plain killing us.
What's most repulsive about Rubio's speech, and the warm embrace it received from the European ruling class, is that its only vision for "Western civilization" is a future of endless imperialist violence.
They have nothing else to offer to their citizens, or to the world. No vision for addressing social and ecological crises, no vision for improving people's lives, no vision for human progress... no other vision for "greatness" besides violence and plunder.
It is, in fact, the antithesis of civilization. It is barbarism.
For the first time the world is generating more electricity from nuclear fusion than fission! Now we just need nuclear (both direct and indirect) to surpass fossil fuels.
CO₂ at Mauna Loa just reached a monthly average of >430 ppm for the first time.
That's possibly higher than in over 3.3 million years.
The global RATE of increase is off the chart.
It's hard to exaggerate how unprecedented this is!
If demand-reduction is the preferred method of inflation control, there are much better ways to achieve this: eg, tax the rich, and use credit policy to reduce commercial bank lending to damaging or unnecessary forms of production that we want to scale down anyhow.
Breaking News!
Code UFB!!!
The 365-day running average for global sea-ice extent is once again in "Gobsmacking bananas" territory, registering an average of 20,247,500 km² on March 12, 2025.
How low will it go? The climate 8-ball says: "Sorry, my funding was cut."
“The United States rejects and denounces the Agenda 2030 for sustainable development and the sustainable development goals, and will no longer reaffirm them as a matter of course.”
The European Commission has just made it clear that the rigid constraints they had placed on public finance were totally artificial. They have now lifted them to enable massive military production.
The EC could have done the same thing to achieve rapid decarbonization and ensure good housing, healthcare, and public transit for all. They could have abolished deprivation, unemployment and economic insecurity. But they did not.
This exposes an extraordinary betrayal. It reveals that the European working classes have been lied to, over and over.
The European Commission has suppressed production of public services, not because it has been fiscally necessary to do so, but because it ensures the conditions for capital accumulation.
There is a strange idea in some environmentalist circles that human population is the main cause of ecological breakdown, and that humans have an *intrinsically* negative impact on ecosystems. Both claims are incorrect.
First, human ecological impact is entirely a function of the system of production and provisioning. It depends on what is being produced, under what conditions, and how the yields of production are distributed.
For instance, an economy that uses mostly public transit, renewable energy, multi-unit housing and plant-based protein can meet human needs with a fraction of the impact of an economy that produces a lot of SUVs, fossil fuels, mansions and industrial beef, and which allocates a bunch of totally unnecessary production to service the fantasies of overconsuming elites.
Remember, we know it is possible to provide decent living standards (DLS) for 8.5 billion people with 30% of current global energy and material use, by ensuring efficient technologies and focusing production on socially necessary goods and services.
That much is fairly straightforward. But one might say that, even so, every person will always have some negative impact. This too is incorrect. Again, it depends entirely on the production system, and specifically, what people are mobilized to do.
Under capitalism, labour is mobilized overwhelmingly to produce things that are profitable to capital. But labour could just as easily be mobilized instead for regeneration. Using straightforward public finance mechanisms, we can fund massive programmes to reforest barren lands, regenerate degraded ecosystems, restore biodiversity, advance agroecological methods, etc.
Under these conditions, it is possible for societies to not only have minimal negative impact on ecology, but to have a net-positive impact, actively improving ecological indicators.
People buy into the myth of the intrinsic destructiveness of humans because we have come to take capitalism for granted. But it is 100% possible to organize production and labour differently.
Under capitalism, we are compelled to produce whatever is most profitable to capital, even if it is destructive to humans and nature. Under conditions of economic democracy, we can produce what we know is necessary for well-being and ecology.
this clip is quite old, but anyone feeling surprised or shocked by today’s result clearly hasn't been paying attention. Obviously I'm biased, but my mate David had a clearer diagnosis of contemporary politics than anyone alive now.
All the takes are correct and yet they also miss the point.
Yes, it was insane for the Democrats to think they could win by running a soulless candidate, without a shred of progressive policy vision, pursuing endorsements from neocon war-hawks everybody hates, while arming and funding a genocide, and belittling and crushing those who have enough morality to protest it. It is enraging that the Democrats are so smug and blind to this.
But these are all just symptoms. The deeper reality is that liberalism has failed, liberalism is dead, and people urgently need to wake up to this fact and respond accordingly. It is a defunct ideology that cannot offer any meaningful solutions to our social and ecological crises and it must be abandoned.
Democrats have proven over and over again that they cannot accept even *basic* steps like public healthcare, affordable housing, and a public job guarantee - things that would dramatically improve the material, social and political conditions of the working classes. And they cannot accept a public finance strategy that would steer production away from fossil fuels and toward green transition to give us a shot at a liveable future.
Why? Because these things run against the objectives of capital accumulation. And for liberals capital is sacrosanct. They will do whatever it takes to ensure elite accumulation, it is their only consistent commitment. At home, they suppress and demonize progressive and socialist tendencies. Abroad, they engage in endless wars and violence to suppress input prices in the global South and prevent any possibility of sovereign economic development.
The Democrats have done all this purposefully and knowingly, for my whole life, not as some kind of "mistake" but in full consciousness that it is in the interests of capital.
And because liberalism cannot address our crises, and because it crushes socialist alternatives, it inevitably paves the way for right-wing populism. They know this pattern, and yet they risk it every time - this election being only the most recent example. They did it in 2016, when they actively crushed the Sanders campaign and sent Trump to the White House. They do it because ultimately they (and I mean the liberal ruling class here) don't really mind if fascists take power, so long as the latter too ensure the conditions for capital accumulation. They 100% prefer this to the possibility of a socialist alternative.
So, progressives have to face reality. The dream of "converting" the Democratic party is dead. This is now a fact and it must be accepted. The only option is to build a mass-based movement that can reclaim the working classes and mobilize a political vehicle that can integrate disparate progressive struggles into a unified and formidable political force and achieve substantive transformation. This will take real work, actual organizing, but it must be done and that process must begin now.
One thing there is very little general understanding of, is that we have passed a critical phase with the climate and ecological crisis, which makes it far different, that it was before.
It is very difficult to define this critical phase, but I will try.
1/
It is high time to put an effective price on carbon and tax the windfall profits of fossil fuel companies.
This isn’t charity.
It is enlightened self-interest.
Climate finance is not a favour.
It is fundamental to a liveable future for all.
En el marco del #DíaMundialdelMedioambiente llevamos a cabo la segunda edición de #EYSustainabilitySummit junto a Chapter Zero, con diversos líderes de cambio climático y sustentabilidad, así como líderes de EY Latinoamérica, US y Global.