Amid Carnage and Ecological Damage, Greenpeace Demands Gaza Cease-Fire / by Jessica Corbett

_{^{Children walk amongst the rubble during the Eid al-Adha celebrations in Gaza on June 15, 2024 | Photo: Khames Alrefi/Middle East Images/AFP via Getty Images}}

“We call for the bullets and bombs to be silenced so that the growing voices for peace can be heard,” said the group

_{Reposted from Common Dreams}

As part of its quest for “a green and peaceful future,” Greenpeace International on Tuesday urged the Israeli government and Hamas to “unequivocally agree to support and abide by” a recent United Nations Security Council resolution and declare “an immediate and permanent cease-fire” in the Gaza Strip.

“We call for the bullets and bombs to be silenced so that the growing voices for peace can be heard,” the environmental advocacy group said in a statement that acknowledges “the horrific events” of October 7—in which Hamas-led militants killed more than 1,100 people in Israel and took around 240 hostages—and the over 37,000 Palestinians who Israeli forces have slaughtered since.

In addition to the rising death toll and at least 85,523 Palestinians injured by the war, “the majority of Gaza’s 2.3 million people have been forced to flee their homes,” Greenpeace highlighted. “Much of Gaza has been reduced to rubble, famine and disease are rife, nowhere and no one is safe. Sanity and humanity must be restored in the face of this unfolding genocide.”

“Beyond the urgent need to end the civilian suffering and ecological devastation, all parties must resume peaceful negotiations.”

The organization pointed to South Africa’s genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice as well as a U.N. commission’s report from last week that concludes the Israeli government and Palestinian militants have committed war crimes.

“We call on Hamas to immediately release all hostages,” Greenpeace said. “We call for the Israeli government to immediately end the blockades on the supply of food, water, medicine, and fuel to the people of Gaza and release all illegally detained civilians.”

“Violence is never the answer, it only brings more violence,” the group emphasized. “Beyond the urgent need to end the civilian suffering and ecological devastation, all parties must resume peaceful negotiations towards a lasting peace built on safety, justice, and equal rights for all. International law must be upheld.”

The United States and European countries that are arming Israel have faced international pressure to use their leverage to halt crimes by its forces. Greenpeace called for “a global embargo on all arms sales and transfers that could be used to further increase the toll of war crimes to be answered by both sides once this war and conflict ends.”

“Greenpeace recognizes the deep historic roots that need to be discussed and negotiated if a permanent peace is to be established,” the group said. “Greenpeace calls for an end to the illegal occupation of Palestine. Greenpeace supports the UNSC resolution ambition that ‘Israel and Palestine live side by side in peace within secure and recognized borders, consistent with international law and relevant U.N. resolutions.”

The Greenpeace statement was released the same day that the U.N. Environment Program (UNEP) published a preliminary assessment of the “environmental impact of the conflict in Gaza,” which features three main sections. The first part addresses the state of the environment and natural resources in the Hamas-governed enclave before October 7.

The second section discusses topics including water, wastewater treatment, and sewage systems; solid waste collection and treatment; destruction of infrastructure and related debris; energy, fuel, and associated infrastructure; marine and coastal environments; terrestrial ecosystems, soil, and cultivated lands; and air pollution.

The third section focuses on chemicals and waste associated with armed conflicts as well as construction, destruction, and flooding of tunnels in Gaza—which, as the report notes, “is a small, densely populated coastal area, the environment of which has been affected by repeated escalations of the decadeslong conflict, unplanned urbanization, and population growth.”

“We urgently need a cease-fire to save lives and restore the environment.”

Inger Andersen, UNEP’s executive director, said in a statement that “not only are the people of Gaza dealing with untold suffering from the ongoing war, the significant and growing environmental damage in Gaza risks locking its people into a painful, long recovery.”

“While many questions remain regarding the exact type and quantity of contaminants affecting the environment in Gaza, people are already living with the consequences of conflict-related damage to environmental management systems and pollution today,” she continued. “Water and sanitation have collapsed. Critical infrastructure continues to be decimated. Coastal areas, soil, and ecosystems have been severely impacted.”

“All of this is deeply harming people’s health, food security, and Gaza’s resilience,” Andersen added. “We urgently need a cease-fire to save lives and restore the environment, to enable Palestinians to start to recover from the conflict and rebuild their lives and livelihoods in Gaza.”

The UNEP report and Greenpeace’s statement followed a study that was posted to SSRN earlier this month and is currently under peer review. Ben Neimark, a co-author of the preprint and lecturer at Queen Mary University of London, said that “while the world’s attention is rightly focused on the humanitarian catastrophe, the climate consequences of this conflict are also catastrophic.”

As Common Dreams reported, Neimark’s team estimated that up to 200,000 Gaza buildings were destroyed or damaged during just the first four months of the war, and the resulting climate costs were greater than the annual emissions of each of the world’s 135 lowest-emitting countries.

_{Jessica Corbett is a senior editor and staff writer for Common Dreams.}

To Abolish War, We Must Transcend Exploitative Interests / by Robert Koehler

_{^{Activists hold a demonstration on the roof of a Raytheon building in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on March 21, 2022 | Photo: Resist and Abolish the Military Industrial Complex}}

Winning isn’t really the point anymore, at least from the point of view of the moneyed interests of war; what matters is waging it—that is to say, what matters is keeping the profits flowing

_{Reposted from Common Dreams}

If we can end, let us say… slavery—the legal “ownership” of other human beings—can’t we also end other great social wrongs? Can’t we also end war?

As I ask this question, I am suddenly bludgeoned by an unexpected irony, since the United States ended slavery through a brutal war, with a death toll of perhaps three quarters of a million people.

But it was worth it, right?

Well, that’s what history tells us. It has essentially “made peace” with the war and now celebrates the moral objectives of the winning side, with all its carnage forever reduced to a statistical abstraction.

When we grow accustomed to the dehumanization of others—the refusal to listen, to acknowledge they have a point of view, let alone a soul—we simplify and diminish ourselves, essentially turning ourselves into our imagined enemy.

The topic of this column is the abolition of war—the urgent necessity of doing so—so, how odd it feels to begin by referencing a “good” war, which ended an enormous wrong… or at least forced the wrong to morph into a different, less legally blatant form of racism known as Jim Crow. (And when Jim Crow was defeated by the nonviolent civil rights movement 100 years later, the nation’s racism morphed into such things as the “war on drugs” and an expanding prison-industrial complex.)

In any case, the Civil War—or at least its reduction to the simplicity of good vs. evil—is the manifestation of war’s staying power and principal talking point: War is always necessary, damnit! Both sides think so, and the winner is the one who gets to write the history. At least that’s the way it used to work.

In my lifetime, things have changed significantly, at least from the point of view of the United States, the world’s primary military power (at least for now). While war is bloodier and more devastating than it’s ever been, it no longer has much to do with winning and losing—at least from the U.S. point of view, which has basically “lost” (whatever that means) every war it has started since the Vietnam era. And that hasn’t seemed to matter. Winning isn’t really the point anymore, at least from the point of view of the moneyed interests of war. What matters is waging it—that is to say, what matters is keeping the profits flowing.

Or to put it more politely: What matters is keeping the sanctity of war alive and well.

Indeed, I’m reminded of George H.W. Bush’s comment in 1991, after the success of the first U.S. Gulf War. “It’s a proud day for America,” Bush declared. “And, by God, we’ve kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all.”

That is to say, the American public’s antiwar cynicism after Vietnam was now just more wreckage to be found on the Highway of Death. War is good again in America! We no longer have to be content simply arming contras and fighting proxy wars. We can get back to the real deal. The military-industrial complex, which was born in the wake of World War II, has returned, front and center.

And that’s where we’re at today. As David Vine and Theresa Arriola write:

Those two forces, the military and the industrial, united with Congress to form an unholy “Iron Triangle…” To this day those three have remained the heart of the MIC, locked in a self-perpetuating cycle of legalized corruption (that also features all too many illegalities).

The basic system works like this: First, Congress takes exorbitant sums of money from us taxpayers every year and gives it to the Pentagon. Second, the Pentagon, at Congress’ direction, turns huge chunks of that money over to weapons makers and other corporations via all too lucrative contracts, gifting them tens of billions of dollars in profits. Third, those contractors then use a portion of the profits to lobby Congress for yet more Pentagon contracts, which Congress is generally thrilled to provide, perpetuating a seemingly endless cycle.

This is the secret context of war—at least American war. The context is hidden behind the enormously effective public relations of war, whose headline slogans over the past few decades have mutated from “war on terror” and “axis of evil” to “Israel has a right to defend itself”—turning thousands and, ultimately, millions of deaths (deaths of civilians, deaths of children) into abstractions: collateral damage. We had no choice.

Knowing the illusions hiding behind the heroism and glory of war—the grotesque profits for some, the horrific toll taken on so many others—is crucial to establishing the urgency of its abolition. And then there’s the cost on the environment: how war poisons our ecosystems; how it murders the planet’s biodiversity; how it diverts our focus (financial and otherwise) from putting our money and energy into saving the planet, to making planetary destruction our primary effort.

And beyond all this, waging war requires the ever-presence in our national minds of… yeah, an enemy. War simplifies conflict, which is always inevitable and could be constructive, and turns it into “us vs. them.” And since nations spend so much money and effort preparing for war, they are always predisposed to turn conflict into the wrong kind of opportunity: an opportunity to define and kill an enemy. And step one is always this: dehumanize the enemy. That makes the killing of the bad guy (and all the collateral civilians who are in the way) totally fine, totally necessary.

And when we grow accustomed to the dehumanization of others—the refusal to listen, to acknowledge they have a point of view, let alone a soul—we simplify and diminish ourselves, essentially turning ourselves into our imagined enemy. And thus we’re always living in fear because war always comes home: Enemies always retaliate. Or their children grow up and retaliate.

So was the Civil War a “good” war, a necessary war? Ending slavery was certainly absolutely necessary, just as never creating it in the first place was necessary… but happened anyway.

The only lesson I can draw is that we’re not going to succeed at abolishing war unless we first succeed at transcending our exploitative interests. What does this mean in today’s world? Let the conversation begin.

_{Robert Koehler is an award-winning, Chicago-based journalist and nationally syndicated writer. Koehler has been the recipient of multiple awards for writing and journalism from organizations including the National Newspaper Association, Suburban Newspapers of America, and the Chicago Headline Club. He’s a regular contributor to such high-profile websites as Common Dreams and the Huffington Post. Eschewing political labels, Koehler considers himself a “peace journalist. He has been an editor at Tribune Media Services and a reporter, columnist and copy desk chief at Lerner Newspapers, a chain of neighborhood and suburban newspapers in the Chicago area. Koehler launched his column in 1999. Born in Detroit and raised in suburban Dearborn, Koehler has lived in Chicago since 1976. He earned a master’s degree in creative writing from Columbia College and has taught writing at both the college and high school levels. Koehler is a widower and single parent. He explores both conditions at great depth in his writing. His book, “Courage Grows Strong at the Wound” (2016). Contact him or visit his website at commonwonders.com.}

GOP Farm Bill Decried as Pro-Corporate, Anti-Family ‘Waste of Everyone’s Time’ / by Jessica Corbett

_{^{People shop for food in a Brooklyn neighborhood in New York City on October 16, 2023 | Photo: Spencer Platt/Getty Images}}

The head of MomsRising said that “it would be mean-spirited and shameful for Congress to cut the SNAP benefits moms and families rely on; and it also would be damaging to our economy.”

_{Reposted from Common Dreams}

Echoing early May criticism of U.S. House Republicans’ blueprint for the next Farm Bill, anti-hunger and green groups on Friday fiercely condemned the GOP’s discussion draft text of the Farm, Food, and National Security Act of 2024.

Released by U.S. House Committee on Agriculture Chair Glenn “GT” Thompson (R-Pa.), the draft is competing with a Democratic proposal—Senate Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry Committee Chair Debbie Stabenow’s (D-Mich.) Rural Prosperity and Food Security Act.

While Thomspon claimed that his bill “is the product of extensive feedback from stakeholders and all members of the House, and is responsive to the needs of farm country through the incorporation of hundreds of bipartisan policies,” Rep. David Scott (D-Ga.), the panel’s ranking member, said that the draft “confirms my worst fears.”

“House Republicans plan to pay for the farm bill by taking food out of the mouths of America’s hungry children, restricting farmers from receiving the climate-smart conservation funding they so desperately need, and barring the USDA from providing financial assistance to farmers in times of crisis,” he warned, referring to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

The economic impact of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) cuts alone “would be staggering,” Scott emphasized. “A $27 billion reduction in food purchasing power would not only increase hunger, but it would also reduce demand for jobs in the agriculture, transportation, manufacturing, and grocery sectors.”

Leaders at advocacy groups on Friday similarly slammed the Republican bill. Ty Jones Cox, vice president for food assistance at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, reiterated her previous condemnation of GOP attempts to cut the benefits of hungry families, saying that “this is unacceptable; Congress should reject it.”

“Every SNAP participant would receive less to buy groceries in future years than they would under current law, putting a healthy diet out of reach for millions of people. This would be the largest cut to SNAP since 1996 if enacted and these cuts would grow even deeper over time,” Jones Cox explained, debunking Thompson’s description of the changes.

“And the cut to future SNAP benefits isn’t the only harmful policy in this bill. For example, it would allow states to outsource SNAP administration to private contractors. But prior privatization efforts delayed benefits for people in need, worsened errors, and increased costs,” she continued. “Congress should reject Chair Thompson’s harmful proposal and instead work to pass a farm bill that truly protects and strengthens SNAP.”

Kristin Rowe-Finkbeiner, executive director and CEO of MomsRising, argued that “at this time when skyrocketing food prices have increased hunger and food insecurity, forcing tens of millions of U.S. families to make impossible choices between food and other essentials, it would be mean-spirited and shameful for Congress to cut the SNAP benefits moms and families rely on; and it also would be damaging to our economy.”

Describing the benefits, formerly called food stamps, as “the nation’s first line of defense against hunger,” Rowe-Finkbeiner highlighted that “more than 42 million people count on SNAP benefits each month and nearly four in five of them are children, seniors, people with disabilities, or veterans.”

“In contrast, the bipartisan Senate Farm Bill—the Rural Prosperity and Food Security Act—aids farmers and treats hunger in America as the emergency it is,” she noted. “It is a bold bill that would protect SNAP benefits and increase access to this essential program for groups that have long been excluded, reducing barriers to participation for older adults, military families, some college students, and others. It is an easy choice. Without question, the Senate Farm Bill is the version that should become law.”

The GOP’s efforts to restrict food assistance aren’t limited to the United States, as Gina Cummings, Oxfam vice president for advocacy, alliances, and policy, pointed out Friday, declaring that “at a time when over 281 million people are suffering from acute hunger, any proposal to undercut crucial international food assistance programs is damaging.”

As Cummings detailed:

The resilience-building programs housed in Food for Peace are vital to preparing frontline communities for future shocks that could impact their food security—whether it be from climate change, conflict, or economic downturns.

Oxfam has raised concerns about the American Farmers Feed the World Act, which is where many of the cuts to Food for Peace originate from—since its introduction last summer. The bill has proposed gutting funding for resilience-building activities that ensure communities can build up their local markets, withstand the next drought, flood, or conflict, and not go hungry. The House Farm Bill as it is currently written includes some of the most concerning provisions of the bill and would render these vital interventions inoperable, resulting in as many as 3 million fewer people being reached by these programs based on their current scale.

The House must reject the provisions of the American Farmers Feed the World Act included in the House Farm Bill draft as the bill goes for markup. The inclusion of such provisions is a threat to global food security and a shift towards a less-efficient model of international aid by the United States.

The AFL-CIO said on social media that it “strongly opposes” the Republican proposal, adding: “Families rely on Food for Peace—and also SNAP, SNAP’s Thrifty Food Plan, and other federal nutrition and food security programs. We cannot support making harmful policy changes or funding cuts to any of them.”

In addition to calling out the GOP for trying to leave more people hungry, advocates denounced Republican efforts to gut climate-friendly requirements from the Inflation Reduction Act and enact the Ending Agricultural Trade Suppression (EATS) Act.

“The Farm Bill is a seminal opportunity to reform our food and agriculture sector away from factory farms and corporate greed,” said Food & Water Watch managing director of policy and litigation Mitch Jones. “Instead, House Republicans want to double down.”

“Some of leadership’s more dangerous proposals would take us backwards on animal welfare, and climate-smart agriculture—both the EATS Act and support for factory farm biogas must be dead on arrival,” he asserted. “It’s time Congress put the culture wars aside and got back to work on a Farm Bill that puts consumers, farmers, and the environment above politicking and Big Ag handouts.”

Brett Hartl, government affairs director at the Center for Biological Diversity, said that “weakening safeguards that protect people from pesticides, slashing protections for endangered species, and recklessly expanding industrial logging should have no place in the Farm Bill.”

“It’s unfortunate that chairman Thompson has put forward such a destructive farm bill to appease the most fringe members of Congress,” Hartl added. “This bill can’t pass the House and it’s a waste of everyone’s time.“

In a joint statement released Friday after a meeting with House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) and Democrats on Thompson’s panel, Scott and Statenow stressed that members of their party are “committed to passing a strong, bipartisan Farm Bill that strengthens the farm and family safety nets and invests in our rural communities.”

“America’s farmers, families, workers, and rural communities deserve the certainty of a five-year Farm Bill, and everyone knows it must be bipartisan to pass,” the pair said, blasting divisive GOP proposals. “Democrats remain ready and willing to work with Republicans on a truly bipartisan Farm Bill to keep farmers farming, families fed, and rural communities strong.”

_{Jessica Corbett is a senior editor and staff writer for Common Dreams.}

Fossil Fuel Companies Use Enclosures to Hide Planet-Heating Methane Flares / by Brett Wilkins

_{^{Flames rise from a flaring pit near a well in the Bakken Oil Field in this undated photograph | Photo: Orjan F. Ellingvag/Corbis via Getty Images}}

“If you enclose the flare, people don’t see it, so they don’t complain about it,” said one expert. “But it also means it’s not visible from space by most of the methods used to track flare volume.”

_{Reposted from Common Dreams}

Fossil fuel companies are using a technology known as enclosed flaring to conceal dangerous methane emitted during the production of fossil gas, a report published Thursday revealed.

The Guardian‘s Tom Brown and Christina Last reported that fossil fuel producers in countries including the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, and Norway “appear to have installed technology that could stop researchers from identifying methane, carbon dioxide emissions, and pollutants at industrial facilities involved in the disposal of unprofitable natural gas.”

As the World Bank, European Union, and others have been using satellites to track flaring—the burning of unwanted fossil gas—in an effort to reduce the harmful practice, fossil fuel producers have been adopting enclosed combustion technology to eliminate unwanted methane.

While the industry promotes enclosed combustors as a clean, safe, and efficient solution for eliminating unwanted emissions and ensuring regulatory compliance, critics claim they’re a way for gas producers to conceal flaring—which releases five times more methane than previously believed, as Common Dreamsreported in 2022.

“Enclosed combustors are basically a flare with an internal flare tip that you don’t see,” Tim Doty, a former regulator at the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, told The Guardian. “Enclosed flaring is still flaring. It’s just different infrastructure that they’re allowing.”

“Enclosed flaring is, in truth, probably less efficient than a typical flare,” Doty added. “It’s better than venting, but going from a flare to an enclosed flare… is not an improvement in reducing emissions.”

Eric Kort, an associate professor at the University of Michigan, told The Guardianthat “if you enclose the flare, people don’t see it, so they don’t complain about it.”

“But it also means it’s not visible from space by most of the methods used to track flare volumes,” he added.

According to a March 2023 report published by the World Bank and Global Gas Flaring Reduction Partnership, an estimated 140 billion cubic meters of gas was flared globally in 2022, a 3% decrease from the previous year. The top 10 countries by flare volume that year were Russia, Iraq, Iran, Algeria, Venezuela, the United States, Mexico, Libya, Nigeria, and China.

Flaring releases carbon dioxide and toxic pollutants including carcinogenic chemicals. Despite these dangers, energy and environmental regulators allow the venting of fossil gas, which is up to 90% methane, into the atmosphere.

Methane—which has more than 80 times the warming power of carbon dioxide during its first two decades in the atmosphere—is emitted during the production and transportation of oil, gas, and coal, as well as from municipal landfills and livestock.

The International Energy Agency (IEA) published a report last October warning that immediate cuts to methane gas pollution caused by fossil fuel production are critical for limiting planetary heating to 1.5°C, the more ambitious objective of the Paris agreement.

The need is urgent. According to the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the three most critical heat-trapping gases in Earth’s atmosphere—carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide—once again reached record levels last year, with methane increasing by 10 parts per billion to 1,922.6 ppb.

Responding to The Guardian‘s reporting, U.K. Green parliamentary candidate Catherine Read said that “oil and gas companies are hiding their ‘flaring’ operations because laws are being brought in to reduce emissions of [greenhouse gases] from waste gas that can’t be sold at a profit.”

“They don’t care about us, our children, or nature,” she added, “only profit above all else.”

_{^{Brett Wilkins is a staff writer for Common Dreams.}}

Complaint of the Great Salt Lake / by John Raby

_{^{Park visitors walk along a section of the Great Salt Lake that used to be underwater at the Great Salt Lake State Park on August 2, 2021 near Magna, Utah | Photo: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images}}

I’m down to 900 square miles now; I’ve been told that if things stay this way, I’ll be gone in five years.

_{Reposted from Common Dreams}

I have a story for you this April about how your tax dollars work. It may not be obvious at the start, but be patient. I need to tell it to you before it’s too late.

In the old days, my waters filled 3,000 square miles, and the streams flowing to me from the Wasatch Mountains kept me full. Along my banks were millions of brine flies that would get into people’s teeth, but the flies fed the birds and the birds fed any creatures willing to hunt them. Though my waters were unfit for people to drink and would pickle any washing in them, there was salt there worth people’s taking. The Shoshone and Ute who visited me took what they needed and otherwise left me alone. It was hard for them to live near me anyway, but we got along. They respected me, and I stayed full.

After a while, the Mormons came, fleeing campaigns of religious cleansing further east. In all his shrewdness, Brigham Young reckoned that no one else would want to settle anywhere near me. You know the rest pretty well. The Mormons were well organized and resourceful enough to build farms along my streams, and they prospered well enough to supply wagon trains going further west to Oregon and California and eventually set up a state. They knew the limits of the land, and for a time, there was no quarrel between the settlers and me.

Once upon a time we got along. No more.

By and by, more settlers arrived. The community grew, and people discovered they could mine my salt and so a commercial industry in salt started. More people came, and industry grew. Motor vehicles followed, with more and more burning of oil and gas. Farmers in the area discovered they could grow high grade alfalfa for export, but that required mechanization and lots of fresh water. As commercial agriculture took more and more water from my streams, the people and I became rivals, and the atmosphere itself began to change.

Utah’s delegation in Congress made sure all this evident prosperity was well supported in Washington. There were plenty of subsidies for the fossil fuels needed to drive this commerce, and for the commerce in armament which grew in size across the nation after 1945. Very few of your lawmakers seemed to mind. The subsidies continued, and the air started to go crazy.

By the 2000s, endless war had begun, and still goes on, along with the Long Drought. There’s less snow in the Wasatch Mountains, and less water in my streams, though no less insistence on it from the alfalfa. Your recent federal effort to rescue the climate, though well-meant, is puny compared to the support your government gives the oil and gas devouring military establishment and the wars it supports in Gaza and Ukraine, where the Earth weeps.

I’m down to 900 square miles now. My waters are less deep. I don’t feel very good, and can’t shake it. I’ve been told that if things stay this way, I’ll be gone in five years. These days, any one of you could count dead birds by the hundreds along my shores, and smell them. The bed on which I now toss and turn has salt in it, but most of it is arsenic-laced toxic dust. When it blows into the air, which it does more and more often, you people breathe it in, especially in the poorest neighborhoods nearest me. Now that the air over Salt Lake City has turned brown, emphysema, Alzheimer’s, and ALS follow. What your leaders call national security makes you sick, and your taxes pay for it, in spite of yourselves.

Once upon a time we got along. No more. Around your country and around the world, you don’t even get along among yourselves, and too many of you have talked yourselves into believing there’s no way out. So much for policy that comes from diseased minds. You sicken, and I die.

Unless you do something about it. I can’t. But you can. No more diseased minds. Wise up. Let Iowa, where the Mormons rested on their way west, grow alfalfa for export. Get free of coal and oil and endless warfare, and maybe the air will be less crazy. Care for one another, because each of you depends on everyone else to meet your needs. Covid-19 should have taught you at least that much.

Even in the Long Drought, there’ll be enough water left in my streams for the rest of your farms, and some for me to drink if you treat my streams with some respect. Once I get well, our quarrels will end. There’ll be no more of my poison dust in the air, and you can take some of my salt for yourselves, just like in the old days. And maybe the Ute and Shoshone will come for a visit.

^{John Raby is a retired history teacher and conscientious objector who is currently co-chair of Peace Action Maine. From 2014 to 2021, when he lived in New Hampshire, he was active with New Hampshire Peace Action and wrote the clean energy policy for New London, New Hampshire. He centers his activism around war and peace, environmental, and social justice issues.}

Our Financial System Is a Suicide Machine / by Bill McKibben

_{^{A Bank of America location is shown in Los Angeles, California | Photo: Coolcaesar/Wikipedia/CC BY-SA 3.0}}

Last week, Bank of America engaged in perhaps the single most irresponsible about-face of the climate era.

_{Reposted from Common Dreams}

Bank of America has its roots in California. Founded in Los Angeles in 1923, it was acquired by a San Francisco bank, which took the name in 1930—and over time it has grown to become the world’s second-largest bank by deposits, second only to New York-based Chase.

I tell you this for two reasons. One, California is, as of this writing, being absolutely battered by an “atmospheric river” that has knocked out power to hundreds of thousands and caused mudslides on high ground along the Pacific Coast. As Andrew Dessler pointed out yesterday, the physics are pretty simple: “A warmer planet has more water vapor in the atmosphere. And, everything else being the same, an atmospheric river carrying more water vapor will cause more rainfall when it hits land and starts rising.”

And second, Bank of America is a proximate cause of this kind of chaos, because it refuses to stop lending for fossil fuel expansion. Indeed, last week it engaged in perhaps the single most irresponsible about-face of the climate era.

They’re far more afraid of some oil-soaked GOP state treasurer than they are of an atmospheric river bearing down on the world’s fifth largest economy.

Three years ago—in the wake of the Greta-inspired mass uprising of young people around the world—Bank of America apparently felt it had to make some gesture, so it chose a pretty easy route to demonstrate its newfound greenness. It said it would no longer lend for new coal mining or coal-fired power plants or for new oil exploration in the Arctic. These were seen to be beyond the pale because… well, they are. They represent some of the most egregious possible insults to this planet.

But last week they said, never mind. If you want some money for a new coal mine, our window is open again. If you’re an oil company that feels like searching for oil in the Arctic now that you’ve melted it, we can make a deal. As the Times reported last week

Bank of America’s change follows intensifying backlash from Republican lawmakers against corporations that consider environmental and social factors in their operations. Wall Street in particular has come under fire for what some Republicans have called “woke capitalism,” a campaign that has pulled banks into the wider culture wars.

That is to say, they’re far more afraid of some oil-soaked GOP state treasurer than they are of an atmospheric river bearing down on the world’s fifth largest economy. It’s proof, of course, that their words about climate change were just pious nonsense. They’d insisted that they understood how crucial it was to change: “Climate change is no longer a far off risk but rather a global concern with impacts that are already beginning to unfold, including increased frequency and severity of extreme weather conditions, melting glaciers, loss of sea ice, accelerated sea-level rise, and longer, more intense heatwaves and droughts.” But that was, we now understand, to be understood entirely as greenwashing, an effort to reduce the heat they were temporarily feeling.

The actual heat they could care less about. It’s not like something has happened since 2021—except the hottest year in the last 125,000, which takes us back even before the advent of money, if BofA executives can even imagine such a time.

But the only weather change they’ve noticed is political. Out with Greta et al., in with GOP politicians saying scary things. And BofA is not alone. The Bureau of Investigative Journalism reported last week that global giant HSBC, despite a solemn promise that it would stop financing new oil and gas fields, has found ways to keep

selling shares in the refining business of Saudi Aramco, one of the most aggressive expanders of oil and gas. An investor in HSBC told the Bureau of Investigative Journalism that the bank’s policy has been cleverly worded to allow it to fund some of the world’s biggest polluters while boasting about its green credentials.

An analysis of Refinitiv data by TBIJ has found that in the year since HSBC’s new policy was announced, the bank has helped raise more than $47 billion (£37 billion) for companies that are expanding the production of oil and gas, despite dire warnings from scientists that this will push the world beyond its survivable limits.

This is all just sick. The International Energy Agency said in 2021 that if we had a chance of meeting the Paris temperature targets, finance for fossil fuel expansion had to end now. But the banks, and big asset managers like BlackRock, just can’t help themselves. For short-term gain, and to protect themselves from attack by right-wing politicians, they are willing to break the back of the planet’s climate system. The unbelievable economic fallout of those decisions—the fact that the world be immensely poorer, with its prospects hugely degraded, by the resulting rise in temperature—will be the problem of some other CEO down the road; it’s hard not to see our financial system as a suicide machine.

Fighting back is hard. At places like Third Act, we’ve done loads of sit-ins and pickets, and it helps—that’s the kind of action that forced these pledges in the first place. But we need some big players on our side. We’re trying, for instance, to convince Costco to pressure its banker Citi; we need the big tech companies, too, to worry not just about about the climate impact of their phones but also about the climate impact of their money (which is far far larger).

We have some champions, of course, but they’re not as hard-hitting as their Red State counterparts. Brad Lander, comptroller of New York City, gets credit for being willing to take the banks on—last week he announced that he’d try to get them to disclose their ratio of dirty energy to clean energy lending, which would certainly be good to know.

“Despite all their talk, the big banks have made little progress in the energy finance transition over the past couple of years,” said Comptroller Lander. “As long-term investors exposed to climate risk, we can’t just take their word for it. Reporting transparently on their ratios of clean energy to fossil fuel finance is key to seeing whether or not they are living up to their net-zero commitments. Right now, they aren’t—and that must change. Our planet, our economy, and our investment portfolios are all at stake.”

All of that is true. But if the planet is at stake, then perhaps a somewhat harder shove might be required. Lander’s plan seems like a way to win slowly, which on most political issues makes sense. But unless he also has a plan to refreeze a melted Arctic, this kind of pressure seems a tad too gentlemanly.

As you can tell, this about face by BofA stings. It takes so much work to move these guys an inch, and then given half a chance they slide right back to where they were before.

Small banks seem able to make money doing decent things—here’s a nice story about a merger of local California banks where they pledged, among other things, to “refrain from any new financing of fossil fuel extraction activities, especially expansion projects that would develop and lock in dependence on new fossil fuel infrastructure, either through corporate or project-based finance, subject to compliance with banking rules and regulations.”

But the big boys? Damn them to hell, which is clearly where they’re content to send all of us.

_{Bill McKibben is the Schumann Distinguished Scholar at Middlebury College and co-founder of 350.org and ThirdAct.org. His most recent book is “Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out?.” He also authored “The End of Nature,” “Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet,” and “Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future.”}

Earth’s Warning Systems Are Flashing Bright Red, But Leaders Refuse to Listen / by Farhana Haque Rahman

_{^{Crane Valley Hotshots set a back fire as the York fire burns in the Mojave National Preserve on July 30, 2023 | Photo by David Swanson/AFP via Getty Images}}

_{Reposted from Common Dreams}

Scientists warn the planet will cross the 1.5 degrees threshold this decade, much earlier than the IPCC fears. The trend is clear, and so are the actions needed.

Another year and another UN climate change conference. As our ‘world leaders’ prepare for two air-conditioned weeks of wrangling at COP28 in Dubai later this month, forgive us for sounding underwhelmed, despairing, and even cynical about these annual jamborees where actions rarely match promises.

Some context: 2023 is almost certain to be the hottest year for Earth for some 125,000 years, and it has already seen devastating storms, floods, extreme drought, and wildfires. September and October set shocking records for monthly global temperature highs.

Earth’s systems are flashing warning signals. Immense carbon sinks in peatlands and tropical wetlands show signs of morphing instead into sources of greenhouse gas emissions; the melting of Antarctic Sea ice has accelerated; the Arctic risks total loss of late summer sea ice in the next decade; drought and deforestation in the Amazon could turn rainforest to savannah.

This year’s Conference of the Parties (COP) comes mid-way between the landmark 2015 Paris Agreement and the 2030 interim target of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 45 percent from 2010 levels to reach net zero emissions by 2050 and thus keep global temperature increases within 1.5 degrees Celsius of pre-industrial levels.

But we are way off target. Based on national commitments made by governments worldwide, we are still heading towards a sizeable increase in emissions by 2030 compared to 2010.

A roadmap to accelerate climate action is desperately needed at COP28. But instead of phasing out fossil fuels – by far the major source of emissions – big and wealthy nations are, in the words of UN Secretary General António Guterres, “literally doubling down on fossil fuel production.”

In aggregate, according to the UN-led 2023 Production Gap Report, governments still plan to produce more than double the amount of fossil fuels in 2030 than would be consistent with limiting warming to 1.5 degrees C.

The report names the top 10 countries responsible for the largest carbon emissions from planned production: India for coal, Saudi Arabia for oil, and Russia for coal, oil, and gas. Major oil producers with big plans also include the US and Canada.

The United Arab Emirates is the host of COP28, due to start on November 30, and is presided over by Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber, UAE industry and advanced technology minister and group CEO of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company.

Of course, producers would not produce without customers. China, the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases, approved the equivalent of two new large coal plants a week in 2022.

So, have we humans already pushed the planet to the point of no return, to a stage of cascading negative feedback loops already triggering a sixth mass extinction of species, the last being 65 million years ago when the dinosaurs were wiped out?

Perhaps not yet… quite… but maybe soon.

In the best judgment of the scientists on the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), in their Sixth Assessment Report published this year, the world has a “rapidly closing window of opportunity to secure a liveable and sustainable future for all…The choices and actions implemented in this decade will have impacts now and for thousands of years.”

They said the same thing last year, but few listened then. Will they now?

Cuts in emissions must be deep and immediate, which is the crux of COP28. As Guterres and many others have shouted from the rooftops, world leaders must agree in Dubai to phase out fossil fuels and shut their ears to the lobbyists who have enabled their petro-state masters to earn billions of dollars in profit this year alone.

As the IPCC scientists also bravely note, there is, thankfully, some climate action. The rate of increase in global greenhouse emissions has slowed and may be peaking; costs of solar and wind energy and batteries have tumbled; the deployment of renewable energy has risen faster than expected; the rate of deforestation has decreased.

IPCC Chair Hoesung Lee did remind everyone last April: “We have the tools and know-how required to limit warming.”

The International Energy Agency’s latest World Energy Outlook 2023 also has some encouraging elements. An analysis of the IEA data by UK-based Carbon Brief suggests that global CO2 emissions from energy use and industry could peak as soon as this year. This is due in part to the worldwide energy crisis triggered by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. China’s slowing economic growth also helps.

Fossil fuel peaks are driven by the “unstoppable” growth of low-carbon technologies, but renewable energy capacity targets will be tripled by 2030, the IEA says. This has to be a key outcome of COP28, an element that China should approve of, given its dominance worldwide in this sector.

It is sad but also just that COP28 may, in the end, be best remembered for the man who will not be there.

Prof Saleemul Huq, Bangladeshi scientist and climate justice activist, died on October 28, aged 71. A man who constantly raised the great moral questions over the unequal sufferings inflicted by the climate crisis, Huq was seen as the champion of the “loss and damage” fund, which was agreed in principle at COP27 in Egypt but has yet to be implemented.

Recent preparatory talks made some progress, with developing countries conceding that the fund will be under the World Bank for an interim period. But the US still insists that contributions from wealthy nations historically responsible for the climate crisis be voluntary, while China insists on exemption given its “developing nation” status. COP28 must get this fund off the ground, and China, too, should stop playing geopolitics.

Named by Nature as one of the world’s top 10 scientists last year, Huq had penned an open letter to the UAE’s Al-Jaber urging him to pre-empt drawn-out debates by announcing the intended creation of the “Dubai Loss and Damage Fund.”

“As far as I am concerned, if all you can say at the end of COP28 is that ‘progress’ has been made on the issue of funding loss and damage, that will be the kiss of death,” Huq wrote, demanding urgent support for the “poorest and most vulnerable people on the planet,” citing by way of example the “over 2,000 climate displaced people” who arrive daily “by foot, cycle, boat and bus in Dhaka and disappear into the city slums.”

Another leftover pledge from COP26 in Glasgow was to double adaptation finance from 2019 levels by 2025. Provisions are dwarfed by needs. They are also dwarfed many times over by the subsidies given to fossil fuels, estimated by the IMF to reach $7 trillion globally last year.

Veteran scientists recently warned that Earth will cross the 1.5 degrees threshold this decade, much earlier than the IPCC fears on our current course. Either way, the trend is clear, and so are the actions needed. The world will judge harshly any failure at COP28 to redress climate injustice or declare a clear pathway to end the exploitation of fossil fuels.

_{Farhana Haque Rahman is Senior Vice President of IPS Inter Press Service and Executive Director IPS Noram; she served as the elected Director General of IPS from 2015-2019. A journalist and communications expert, she is a former senior official of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization and the International Fund for Agricultural Development.}

Climate Groups Plan to Appeal as Judge Upholds Biden Approval of Willow Drilling Project / by Jake Johnson

_{^{Green Groups ‘Undeterred’ Despite US Judge Allowing Willow Oil Project to Proceed | Photo: Celal Gunes/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images}}

_{Reposted from Common Dreams}

“Beyond the illegality of Willow’s approval, Interior’s decision to greenlight the project in the first place moved us in the opposite direction of our national climate goals in the face of the worsening climate crisis.”

A federal judge in Anchorage ruled Thursday that ConocoPhillips’ $8 billion oil drilling project on Alaska’s North Slope can proceed, rejecting a pair of lawsuits arguing that the Biden administration failed to adequately consider the initiative’s impact on the climate, local communities, and wildlife before approving it earlier this year.

Willow is the largest proposed oil and gas drilling project on public lands in U.S. history, and it comes at a time when scientists are warning that any new fossil fuel extraction is incompatible with preventing catastrophic planetary warming.

But despite warnings about Willow’s potentially devastating impact, U.S. District Court Judge Sharon Gleason—an Obama appointee—deemed the Biden administration’s environmental assessments of the project sufficient and in line with federal law. The ruling was handed down a day after a U.N.-backed report cautioned that fossil fuel expansion plans by the world’s top producers are “throwing humanity’s future into question.”

Climate groups voiced strong disagreement and outrage in response to Gleason’s decision, which gives ConocoPhillips a green light to resume construction of the massive project next month.

“This decision is bad news not just for our clients, but for anyone who cares about the climate and future generations,” said Bridget Psarianos, senior staff attorney with Trustees for Alaska, which sued the Biden Interior Department on behalf of the Sovereign Iñupiat for a Living Arctic and others.

“The Biden administration added a little more window dressing when it rubber-stamped the previous Trump approvals, but Interior handed out permits without even looking at options that would reduce the impact on local people or preclude drilling in sensitive ecosystems,” Psarianos added. “It again did not consider the accumulation of impacts of greenhouse gas emissions and climate change, nor the way those accumulations harm people, animals, habitat, and the planet in deep and tangible ways.”

“While today’s ruling is disappointing, we are entirely confident in our claims, and plan to appeal to the higher court.”

In March, the Biden Interior Department—headed by Deb Haaland, who criticized the proposed Willow project when she was in Congress—approved what it characterized as a scaled-back version of the ConocoPhillips drilling initiative, drawing protests and criticism from environmentalists, Indigenous groups, and the United Nations.

The administration approved the project with three drilling sites instead of the five that ConocoPhillips wanted. But even the smaller version of Willow will be disastrous for the climate, green groups argued.

According to Earthjustice, which sued the administration on behalf of several climate organizations, the approved project “will still add about 260 million metric tons of carbon emissions into the atmosphere over the next 30 years, the equivalent of an extra two million cars on the road each year for 30 years.”

“While today’s ruling is disappointing, we are entirely confident in our claims, and plan to appeal to the higher court,” Erik Grafe, deputy managing attorney in Earthjustice’s Alaska regional office, said in a statement Thursday. “Beyond the illegality of Willow’s approval, Interior’s decision to greenlight the project in the first place moved us in the opposite direction of our national climate goals in the face of the worsening climate crisis.”

_{Jake Johnson is a senior editor and staff writer for Common Dreams.}