A decision handed down by one of the European Union’s top courts on Tuesday should signal to governments across the bloc and beyond that their time may soon be up when it comes to delaying climate action, as the panel ruled the Swiss government has violated the human rights of its senior citizens by refusing to abide by scientists’ warnings and swiftly phase out fossil fuel production.
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The alleged illegal union-busting that Mercedes-Benz autoworkers in Vance, Alabama accused the car company of in a complaint to the National Labor Relations Board has not weakened the resolve of pro-union employees, a supermajority of whom now support a union election, according to the United Auto Workers. The union announced Friday that more than 5,000 workers at the company’s nonunion plant have…
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As public health experts raise alarm over the prevalence of highly toxic “forever chemicals,” as per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances or PFAS are commonly known, one nonprofit investigative journalism outlet warned Saturday that a recent ruling could further tie up the regulatory process for the chemicals and other harmful substances. “This ruling is likely to impede already excruciatingly slow…
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Palestinians on Saturday were joined by people across the globe in marking Land Day, the 48th anniversary of Israel’s killing of six unarmed protesters who rose up against the Israeli government’s confiscation and occupation of Palestinian land. Thousands of Palestinian people marched through Deir Hanna, one of the Israeli towns where authorities violently cracked down on nonviolent protesters on…
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Fossil fuel-producing countries late last year pledged to “transition away from fossil fuels,” but a report on new energy projects shows that with the United States leading the way in continuing to extract oil and gas, governments’ true views on renewable energy is closer to a statement by a Saudi oil executive Amin Nasser earlier this month. “We should abandon the fantasy of phasing out oil and…
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Saying her job at a State Department office that advocates for human rights in the Middle East has become “impossible” as the Biden administration continues to back Israel’s assault on civilians in Gaza, foreign affairs officer Annelle Sheline resigned from her position on Wednesday in protest of President Joe Biden’s policy in the region. Sheline noted in an interview with The Washington Post…
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With more than 100,000 Michigan voters having cast primary ballots letting U.S. President Joe Biden know they are “uncommitted” to supporting him in the general election due to his continued support for Israel’s genocidal violence in Gaza, organizers of the effort said Wednesday that the Listen to Michigan campaign is spreading to other states. Voters in Colorado, Minnesota, and North Carolina are…
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Florida Republicans are unlikely to pass a so-called “fetal personhood” bill during the current legislative session following a Senate committee’s decision on Monday to postpone further consideration of the proposal, which had been approved by several committees before an Alabama Supreme Court ruling last week sparked a national uproar over the right-wing push to secure rights for “the unborn.”…
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Texas officials recorded the state’s second-largest wildfire in its history on Tuesday and into early Wednesday as several fast-moving blazes formed what one resident called a “ring of fire” around her town in the Panhandle and forced a temporary closure of a nuclear weapons facility. The Texas A&M Forest Service said early Wednesday that the main blaze, dubbed the Smokehouse Creek Fire…
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Amid a recent surge in unionization and other workers’ rights victories, wealthy U.S. corporations have fired union organizers, surveilled employees as they voted on forming a collective bargaining unit, and closed store locations to penalize labor leaders — but a court filing by Amazon on Thursday suggested a new tactic as the e-commerce giant seeks to dismantle the federal agency tasked with…
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Israel’s bombardment of Rafah in southern Gaza and its stated plan to expand its attack with a ground assault puts the country in breach of a clear directive from the International Court of Justice, said South African officials on Tuesday, less than three weeks after the court ordered Israel to do everything in its power to prevent genocidal violence in Gaza. The South African government made an…
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As world governments gathered in Uzbekistan Monday for the United Nations conference on migratory species, they centered the theme “Nature Knows No Borders” — an idea that a new landmark report said must take hold across the globe to push policymakers in all countries and regions to protect the billions of animals that travel each year to reproduce and find food. The Convention on the Conservation…
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While Israeli officials continue to claim, despite all evidence to the contrary, that the Israel Defense Forces are targeting Hamas in their bombardment of occupied Palestine, a new report from Amnesty International on Monday details the extent to which the military has frequently used lethal force against civilians across the West Bank in addition to the more than 27,000 people it has killed in…
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Calling on the United States to “end its complicity in the nightmare unfolding in Gaza,” U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders on Friday said he would introduce an amendment to remove more than $10 billion from the foreign aid supplemental requested by President Joe Biden. The $10.1 billion has been proposed to pay for offensive weaponry funding for the Israeli government, which has killed at least 27,131…
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Flanked by several dozen uniformed members of Florida’s State Guard and standing behind a podium displaying the words “Stop the Invasion,” Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis on Thursday announced a plan to send the civilian force and other resources to Texas, where Gov. Greg Abbott’s administration has been embroiled in a standoff with the White House over the U.S-Mexico border. DeSantis said the State…
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As The New York Times reported Sunday that more than 1,000 Black American pastors have joined the widespread call for a cease-fire in Gaza, U.S. Rep. Nancy Pelosi suggested the demand was “Putin’s message” and said the FBI should investigate groups that are speaking out about Biden’s pro-Israel policies. On CNN, the former House speaker, a California Democrat, told Dana Bash that the “call for a…
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Progressives on Saturday urged the U.S. President to halt his immigration-related appeals to “a voter who doesn’t exist” as he promised voters at a campaign event in South Carolina that he would immediately “shut down the border” between the U.S. and Mexico if Congress passes a bipartisan immigration bill. Senators are expected to release the legislative text of the bill this week…
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A global human rights coalition expressed hope Thursday that the imminent verdict by the International Court of Justice will be a step toward “stopping the genocide in Palestine” as authorities in Gaza reported new attacks on civilians and alleged violations of international law. The ICJ said this week that it will announce its verdict on Friday at 7:00 am ET in the genocide case brought by South…
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A ruling in Louisiana by a federal judge appointed by former Republican President Donald Trump will make it even harder for communities to fight environmental racism and the establishment of “sacrifice zones,” said one advocacy group on Tuesday. U.S. District Court Judge James Cain, Jr., appointed in 2018, ruled in favor of Louisiana eight months after GOP Attorney General Jeff Landry sued the…
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As the only major U.S. oil company that still hasn’t set emissions-reduction targets for all of their operations and products, an activist shareholder group said Monday that ExxonMobil has likely seen “the writing on the wall” and is making a last-ditch effort to avoid new pollution requirements, leading it to file a lawsuit to stop investors from voting on a climate resolution at its next annual…
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Outrage spread Friday after the story about a pastor in Ohio who was arrested and charged for opening his church to homeless people when extreme cold weather struck his town gained national attention. Chris Avell, the pastor of an evangelical church called Dad’s Place in Bryan, Ohio, pleaded not guilty last Thursday to charges that he broke 18 restrictions in zoning code when he gave shelter to…
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The Israel Defense Forces’ detonation of more than 300 mines planted at Israa University in Gaza on Wednesday provided the latest evidence that Israel’s objective in its bombardment of the enclave is not self-defense, rights advocates said. “This is not self-defense,” said Chris Hazzard, an Irish member of the United Kingdom’s Parliament. “This is not counter-insurgency. This is ethnic-cleansing.”…
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This story originally appeared in Common Dreams on Jan. 17, 2024. It is shared here with permission under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0) license.
New research on the rate at which Greenland’s glaciers are melting shed new light on how the climate emergency is rapidly raising the chance that crucial ocean current systems could soon collapse, as scientists revealed Wednesday that the vast island has lost about 20% more ice than previously understood.
Scientists at the National Aeronautics and Space Agency (NASA) Jet Propulsion Laboratory led the study, published in Nature, which showed that Greenland’s ice cap is losing an average of 33 million tons of ice per hour, including from glaciers that are already below sea level.
The researchers analyzed satellite photos showing the end positions of Greenland’s glaciers every month from 1985 to 2022, examining a total of about 235,000 end positions.
Over the 38-year period, Greenland lost about 1,930 square miles of ice—equivalent to one trillion metric tons and roughly the size of Delaware.
An earlier study had estimated that 221 billion metric tons had been lost since 2003, but the researchers added another 43 billion metric tons to that assessment.
Previous research had not quantified the level of ice melt and breakage from the ends of glaciers around the perimeter of Greenland.
“Almost every glacier in Greenland is retreating. And that story is true no matter where you look,” Chad Greene, a glaciologist at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory who led study, told The New York Times. “This retreat is happening everywhere and all at once.”
Because the glaciers examined in the study are already below sea level, their lost ice would have been replaced by sea water and would not have contributed to sea-level rise.
But as Greene told The Guardian, “It almost certainly has an indirect effect, by allowing glaciers to speed up.”
“These narrow fjords are the bottleneck, so if you start carving away at the edges of the ice, it’s like removing the plug in the drain,” he said.
The previously unaccounted-for ice melt is also an additional source of freshwater that pours into the North Atlantic Ocean, which scientists warn places the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) at risk of collapse.
AMOC carries warm water from the tropics into the North Atlantic, allowing nutrients to rise from the bottom of the ocean and supporting phytoplankton production and the basis of the global food chain.
A collapse of the system would also disrupt weather patterns across the globe, likely leading to drier conditions and threatening food security in Asia, South America, and Africa, and increasing extreme weather events in other parts of the world.
One analysis found the collapse could take place as soon as 2025.
Charlie Angus, a member of the Canadian Parliament representing the New Democratic Party, noted that the study was released as Canada’s government continues to support fossil fuel production and what experts call false solutions to the planetary heating crisis—including a $12 billion carbon capture and storage project led by tar sands oil companies.
The Environmental Voter Project in the U.S. urged Americans to consider the latest statistics on melting glaciers when choosing the candidates and political parties they will support in 2024.
“Greenland is losing 30 million tons of ice an hour,” said the group. “So vote like it.”
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As the United States insists on continuing state-sanctioned killings despite a European ban on drugs commonly used in capital punishment, the United Nations Human Rights Office warned Tuesday that Alabama officials may soon violate international laws banning torture as they plan to use nitrogen gas in an upcoming execution. A number of U.N. officials have said in recent days that the planned…
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This story originally appeared in Common Dreams on Jan. 10, 2024. It is shared here with permission under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0) license.
The prison escapes of two criminal gang leaders in Ecuador has been linked to President Daniel Noboa’s decision this week to declare a 60-day “state of emergency,” but one human rights expert said Wednesday that the violence that’s erupted in recent days—and Ecuador’s explosion in violent crime in recent years—was made inevitable by the United States-led “war on drugs.”
On Sunday, Los Choneros gang leader José Adolfo Macías Villamar, also known as Fito, escaped from a prison in the port city of Guayaquil—shortly before Fabricio Colón Pico of the rival gang Los Lobos also fled a detention center. Los Choneros works with Mexico’s Sinaloa drug cartel while Colón’s gang is linked to Jalisco New Generation (CJNG).
The prison breaks led authorities to call for a massive police deployment, sparking clashes which ultimately led to the killings of eight people in Guayaquil as well as two police officers in nearby Nobol, officials said Tuesday.
“Authorities say there have been at least 23 different violent incidents in eight provinces, including a number of car bombs going off,” Alessandro Rampietti of Al Jazeera reported from Quito on Tuesday. “A number of police cars were incinerated and at least seven police officers were kidnapped by gang members.”
Noboa took action shortly after 13 armed people, disguised in hoods, stunned the nation Tuesday by storming the publicly-owned TC Television studio in Guayaquil, a central point for drug smuggling in Ecuador. The attack took place while cameras were rolling, with audiences able to hear a woman saying, “Don’t shoot, please don’t shoot.”
The 13 attackers were arrested when police arrived about 30 minutes into the incident, followed by an announcement by the president that Ecuador had entered a state of “internal armed conflict.”
“I have just signed a state of emergency decree so that the armed forces have all the political and legal support for their actions,” Noboa said. “The time is over when drug trafficking convicts, hitmen, and organized crime dictate to the government what to do.”
Noboa ordered the armed forces to “neutralize” criminal gangs including Los Lobos and Los Choneros, whose cartels have increased their presence in Ecuador since the coronavirus pandemic began as they fight to take over the Guayaquil area—a key stop on international drug trafficking routes from Colombia to the U.S. and Europe.
Violent deaths surged to at least 8,008 in 2023, according to government figures—nearly doubling from the previous year. A record 200 tonnes of drugs were seized by authorities last year, Al Jazeera reported.
As journalist Nick Corbishley wrote at Naked Capitalism in early October, the U.S. has recently escalated the “war on drugs” in Ecuador:
Last Friday (September 29), the country’s outgoing president (and former senior banker) Guillermo Lasso held a closed-door meeting with senior officials of the U.S. Coast Guard and Department of Defense in Washington. The outcome of that meeting was two status agreements, one that will allow the deployment of U.S. naval forces along Ecuador’s coastline while the other will permit the disembarking of U.S. land forces on Ecuador’s soil, albeit only at the request of Ecuador’s government.
All with the ostensible aim of combating drug trafficking organizations.
Obviously, that is not what this is really about. If Washington were serious about tackling the violence generated by the drug cartels, the first thing it could do is pass legislation to stem the southward flow of U.S.-produced guns and other weapons. But that would hurt the profits of arms manufacturers. And if it were remotely serious about tackling the major cause of the drug problem—the rampant consumption of narcotics within its own borders—it would never have let Big Pharma unleash the opium epidemic. And once it had, it would never have let the perps walk free with the daintiest of financial slaps on the wrists.
The primary goal of this latest escalation in the U.S.’ decades-old war on drugs, as with all previous escalations, is to achieve or maintain geostrategic dominance in key, normally resource-rich regions of the world while keeping the restive populace at home in line—or in prison, generating big bucks for the prison industrial complex.
Ecuador’s rise in violence, including the escalation over the last several days “underscores the urgency of revisiting global drug prohibition, in addition to addressing other root causes,” said Maria McFarland, acting deputy program director of Human Right Watch (HRW).
“In 2012 the presidents of Colombia, Guatemala, and Brazil made a plea to the United Nations to revisit global drug prohibition for precisely these reasons,” said McFarland, former executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance. “Former heads of state from multiple countries continue to call for alternative approaches.”
The violence combined with economic hardship has propelled tens of thousands of Ecuadoreans to flee, crossing the dangerous Darién Gap between Colombia and Panama to head north, with many arriving at the U.S.-Mexico border.
Juanita Goebertus, director of the Americas division for HRW, told El País that to make Ecuador safer for all residents the government must “strengthen its judicial capacity, control prisons, and investigate money laundering, and corruption.”
“The decision to characterize a context as an internal armed conflict must always be technical and based on international humanitarian law,” said Goebertus of Noboa’s decree. “Otherwise, the rights of citizens are put at risk.”
This post was originally published on The Real News Network.
Hundreds of Jewish progressives in California on Wednesday led the latest mass protest to reject “business as usual” amid Israel’s U.S.-backed slaughter of Palestinian civilians, shutting down the first day of the 2024 legislative session at the state Capitol in Sacramento to demand an immediate, permanent cease-fire in Gaza. As residents of the state with the largest economy in the U.S.
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This story originally appeared in Common Dreams on Jan. 1, 2024. It is shared here with permission under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0) license.
The year 2023 was marked by weather events that made it increasingly clear that the Earth has entered what United Nations Secretary General António Guterres called the “era of global boiling,” with wildfires and prolonged heatwaves impacting millions of people and scientists confirming their suffering was the direct result of fossil fuel extraction and planetary heating.
But for the world’s five largest oil giants, the year marked record profits and the approval of several major new fossil fuel projects, allowing the companies to lavish their shareholders with payouts that are expected to exceed $100 billion—signaling that executives have little anxiety that demand for their products will fall, said one economist.
The companies—BP, Shell, Chevron, ExxonMobil, and TotalEnergies—spent $104 billion on shareholder payouts in 2022, and are expected to reward investors with even more in buybacks and dividends for 2023, The Guardian reported.
Shell announced plans in November to pay investors at least $23 billion—more than six times the amount it planned to spend on renewable energy projects—while BP promised shareholders a 10% raise in dividends and Chevron could exceed the $75 billion stock buyback it announced early last year.
Alice Harrison, a campaigner for Global Witness, noted that fossil fuel shareholders will be enjoying their paydays as households across Europe struggle with fuel poverty and the world faces the rising threat of climate disasters brought on by the industry.
“The global energy crisis has been a giant cash grab for fossil fuel firms,” Harrison told The Guardian. “And instead of investing their record profits in clean energy, these companies are doubling down on oil, gas, and shareholder payouts. Yet again millions of families won’t be able to afford to heat their homes this winter, and countries around the world will continue to suffer the extreme weather events of climate collapse. This is the fossil fuel economy, and it’s rigged in favor of the rich.”
In 2023 campaigners intensified their demands for accountability from the oil, gas, and coal industries, and as of last month had successfully pressured more than 1,600 universities, pension funds, and other institutions to divest from fossil fuels. In the U.S., provisions in the Inflation Reduction Act, which has been touted as the “largest investment in climate and energy in American history,” went into effect.
But Dieter Helm, a professor of economic policy at the University of Oxford, The Guardian that if the industry were truly fearful of policymakers phasing out fossil fuel extraction and expediting a transition to renewable sources, they would be spending far less on new projects and shareholder payouts.
“For this to be the case you would have to believe that the energy transition is happening, and that demand for fossil fuels is going to fall,” Helm told The Guardian.
In 2023, U.S. President Joe Biden infuriated climate campaigners by approving the Willow oil drilling project in Alaska, which could lead to roughly 280 million metric tons of heat-trapping carbon dioxide emissions. His administration also included in a debt limit deal language that would expedite the approval of the Mountain Valley Pipeline, which could emit the equivalent of more than 89 million metric tons of carbon dioxide, while the U.K. government greenlit a massive oil drilling field in the North Sea and French company TotalEnergies continued to construct the 900-mile-long East African Crude Oil Pipeline, which would transport up to 230,000 barrels of crude oil per day.
“These companies are investing a huge amount in new projects, and they’re handing out bigger dividends because they are confident that they’re going to make big returns,” Helm said. “And when we look at the state of our current climate progress, who’s to say they’re wrong?”
Climate campaigner Vanessa Nakate pointed out that the shareholder paydays are expected following a deal on a loss and damage fund at the 28th annual United Nations Climate Change Conference, aimed at helping developing countries to fight the climate emergency. That fund was hailed as “historic” and included a commitment of $700 million from wealthy countries—a sum that is expected to be dwarfed by fossil fuel investors’ profits.
“They have picked people’s pockets, fueled inflation and pollution, and deepened poverty,” U.K. House of Lords member and Tax Justice Network co-founder Prem Sikka said of the oil giants. “Governments do nothing to end their monopolistic control. Need to break-up this cartel.”
This post was originally published on The Real News Network.
The year 2023 was marked by weather events that made it increasingly clear that the Earth has entered what United Nations Secretary General António Guterres called the “era of global boiling,” with wildfires and prolonged heatwaves impacting millions of people and scientists confirming their suffering was the direct result of fossil fuel extraction and planetary heating. But for the world’s five…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
“No one knows apartheid like those who fought it before,” said one Palestinian rights advocate on Friday in response to the news that South Africa has taken a “historic” new step to hold Israel accountable for its relentless bombardment and violent yearslong occupation of Gaza — calling on the International Court of Justice to declare that Israel has breached its obligations under the Genocide…
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