“Harris Tells Americans They Will Have to Pay More for Gas To Punish Russia,” proclaimed the New York Timesheadline recently. So spoke no less an authority on economics than the Vice President of the United States. Harris was on a visit to Poland to reassure a nervous NATO member and to egg on the war in Ukraine at the cost of ever more Ukrainian and Russian lives and higher inflation in the US and the world.
Inflation, Already Bad, Will be Worsened by the War in Ukraine.
The Times’s report on Harris’s declaration, however, concluded with this sobering reminder:
The sanctions could also complicate the political situation back in the U.S., where Americans have for months grappled with growing inflation, which has driven down the approval ratings of the Biden presidency.
The Consumer Price Index rose by 7.9 percent through February, the fastest pace of inflation in 40 years. The average price for a gallon of gas was $4.32 on Thursday, according to AAA. Economists say because of those record gas prices, inflation is expected to climb even more.
To be clear, the extraordinary 7.9% inflation increase predates the crisis in Ukraine although Joe Biden has attempted to blame it all on the thoroughly demonized Putin. But unless cause can come after effect, Joe has a tough argument to make there. However, it is clear that the war and the sanctions that go with it are accelerating inflation. And it is also clear from every poll that inflation (and the pandemic) are very much on the minds of Americans. Political analysts tell us that the 2022 Congressional elections and probably the 2024 elections will turn in large part on the issue of inflation.
A grassroots approach to stopping the war in Ukraine.
It is clear that the public is very likely to oppose US sanctions on Russia and US involvement in Ukraine IF either proves to drive up gas prices, food prices and other items in an accelerated inflationary spiral.
Our strategy should be to link the inflation with prolonging a war in a far-away land which has little to do with US security and risks a nuclear confrontation with Russia.
We should have rallies opposing ALL US involvement in Ukraine by tying them to gas prices, food prices, rents and other items.
Let us have demonstrations, not at the US Congress and not at military bases, but at gas stations and supermarkets. Especially highly visible gas stations; there is surely one near you.
Let us hold up placards with a simple message:
Biden’s arms to Ukraine = Longer War.
Longer War = Higher Gas Prices.
Ukraine is not our biz.
Come Home, America.
Ukraine as US proxy war against Russia to be fought to the last Ukrainian.
The war in Ukraine is a US war with Russia, with Ukraine as a US proxy. So we in the US can stop it by getting one of the parties, the US, to end its involvement. That is the right and moral responsibility of those in the US. And it is the action that we as citizens are best positioned to do. The effective action.
If, in the face of facts, one believes that this is not a US proxy war but a war between the US and Ukraine, then it is none of our business. But the course of action is the same. We should still call for an end to sending weapons, materiel and “advisors” to Ukraine and its environs. We should stay out it and avoid foreign entanglements in European disputes – the very thing that the Founders warned us about. That course is anti-interventionism as opposed to pursuing imperial or dubious ideological agendas.
The best way to stop escalation of the war is to take the offensive.
The Biden administration is getting a lot of credit for refusing to be part of a no-fly zone and turning thumbs down on US troops on the ground in Ukraine. But as time goes by, pressure is building for escalation. At a recent press briefing we saw a number of reporters from the White House press core badgering Jen Psaki and inquiringly petulantly why the President has not done more. And on top of that we have Biden embarrassing himself by making statements contrary to his own policy – either out of confusion or as a way of telling people what the real policy is. Dangerous escalation is waiting just around the corner.
The best way to stop this vehicle from going forward is to apply the brakes, put it in reverse and leave the question of escalation in the rearview mirror. Let us make de-escalation not escalation the question of the day. Let us push escalation off the table altogether.
Let’s go out to our local gas station or supermarket to stop the war in its tracks and not only avoid escalation but save countless lives. As I finish here, I just heard Max Blumenthal on the Jimmy Dore show suggest something along the same lines, signage at gas stations linking the war and inflation. Let’s try it.
No weapons to Ukraine. No sanctions on the world. End the war and stop the inflation.
On Thursday, President Joe Biden ordered the largest release ever from the US emergency oil reserve in a futile attempt to bring down gasoline prices that have soared to record levels following the Russo-Ukraine War. Starting in May, the United States will release 1 million barrels per day (bpd) of crude oil for six months from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR), amounting to 180 million barrels in total, which is equivalent to only two days of the global demand.
Invoking the fabled trope of American patriotism, Biden urged the consumers not to hesitate from paying twice the amount while filling gas tanks in order for the military-industrial complex to reap billions of dollars windfalls by providing anti-aircraft and anti-armor munitions to NATO’s proxies in Ukraine. “This is a moment of consequence and peril for the world, and pain at the pump for American families. It’s also a moment of patriotism,” Biden said at an event at the White House.
The US announcement came a day before the International Energy Agency member countries were set to meet on Friday to discuss a further emergency oil release that would follow their March 1 agreement to release about 60 million barrels that would cover only two-third of a single day’s oil demand, as the global net oil consumption per day is over 90 million barrels. With over 10 million barrels daily oil production capacity, Russia, alongside Saudi Arabia, is the world’s largest oil producer accounting for providing over 10% of the world’s crude oil demand.
As far as military power is concerned, Russia with its enormous arsenal of conventional as well as nuclear weapons more or less equals the military power of the United States. But it’s the much more subtle and insidious tactic of economic warfare for which Russia seems to have no answer following the break-up of the Soviet Union in the nineties and consequent dismantling of the once-thriving communist bloc, spanning Eastern Europe, Latin America and many socialist states in Asia and Africa in the sixties.
The current global neocolonial order is being led by the United States and its West European clients since the signing of the Bretton Woods Accord in 1945 following the Second World War. Historically, any state, particularly those inclined to pursue socialist policies, that dared to challenge the Western monopoly over global trade and economic policies was internationally isolated and its national economy went bankrupt over a period of time. But for once, it appears Washington might shoot itself in the foot by going overboard in its relentless efforts to punish Russia for invading Ukraine.
On March 17, Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe and Anoosheh Ashoori, two British-Iranian nationals held in Iran since 2016 and 2017, respectively, were unexpectedly set free and were permitted to travel to the United Kingdom. In return, the British government, in what gave the impression of a ransom payment, triumphantly announced it had settled a £400m debt owed to Iran from the seventies.
The thaw in the frosty relations between the Western powers and Iran signaled that a tentative understanding on reviving the Iran nuclear deal was also reached behind the scenes, particularly in the backdrop of the Ukraine crisis and the Western efforts to internationally isolate Russia. After sanctioning Russia’s 10 million barrels daily crude oil output, the industrialized world is desperately in need of Iran’s 5 million barrels oil production capacity to keep the already inflated oil price from causing further pain to consumers.
Last month, Venezuela similarly released two incarcerated US citizens in an apparent goodwill gesture toward the Biden administration following a visit to Caracas by a high-level US delegation, despite the fact that Washington still officially recognizes Nicolas Maduro’s detractor Juan Guaido as Venezuela’s “legitimate president.” Nonetheless, Venezuela is one of Latin America’s largest oil producers and opening the international market to its heavy crude might provide a welcome relief in the time of global oil crunch.
Niftily forestalling the likelihood of strengthening of mutually beneficial bonds between China and Russia when the latter is badly in need for economic relief, the United States pre-emptively accused China of pledging to sell military hardware to Russia, when the latter, itself one of the world’s leading arms exporters, didn’t even make any such request to China.
US National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan held an intense seven-hour meeting in Rome with his Chinese counterpart Yang Jiechi on March 15, and warned China of “grave consequences” of evading Western sanctions on Russia. Besides wielding the stick of economic sanctions, he must also have dangled the carrot of ending trade war against China initiated by the Trump administration and continued by the Biden administration until Russia invaded Ukraine in late February.
Despite vowing to treat the Saudi kingdom as a “pariah” in the run-up to November 2020 presidential elections, the Wall Street Journal reported last month the White House unsuccessfully tried to arrange calls between President Biden and the de facto leaders of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates as the US was working to build international support for Ukraine and contain a surge in oil prices.
“Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and the U.A.E.’s Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed al Nahyan both declined U.S. requests to speak to Mr. Biden in recent weeks, the officials said, as Saudi and Emirati officials have become more vocal in recent weeks in their criticism of American policy in the Gulf.
“‘There was some expectation of a phone call, but it didn’t happen,’ said a U.S. official of the planned discussion between the Saudi Prince Mohammed and Mr. Biden. ‘It was part of turning on the spigot [of Saudi oil].’
“But the Saudis and Emiratis have declined to pump more oil, saying they are sticking to a production plan approved by OPEC. Both Prince Mohammed and Sheikh Mohammed took phone calls from Russian President Vladimir Putin last week, after declining to speak with Mr. Biden.”
To add insult to the injury, Saudi Arabia has reportedly invited Chinese President Xi Jinping for an official visit to the kingdom that could happen as soon as May, and is also considering pegging its vast oil reserves in yuan, a move that could spell end to the petrodollar hegemony.
The United States and Britain were ramping up pressure on Saudi Arabia to pump more oil and join efforts to isolate Russia, while Riyadh had shown little readiness to respond and had revived a threat to ditch dollars in its oil sales to China, Reuters reported last month.
“If Saudi Arabia does that, it will change the dynamics of the forex market,” said a source with knowledge of the matter, adding that such a move—which the source said Beijing had long requested and which Riyadh threatened as far back as 2018—might prompt other buyers to follow.
Trump aptly observed: “Now Biden is crawling around the globe on his knees begging and pleading for mercy from Saudi Arabia, Iran and Venezuela.” It appears quite plausible that in its relentless efforts to internationally isolate Russia, the Biden administration is likely to unravel the whole neocolonial economic order imposed on the world after the signing of the Bretton Woods Accord following the Second World War in 1945.
In order to bring home the significance of the Persian Gulf’s oil in the energy-starved industrialized world, here are a few stats from the OPEC data: Saudi Arabia has the world’s largest proven crude oil reserves of 266 billion barrels and its daily oil production is 10 million barrels; Iran and Iraq each has 150 billion barrels reserves and has the capacity to produce 5 million barrels per day each; while UAE and Kuwait each has 100 billion barrels reserves and produces 3 million barrels per day each; thus, all the littoral states of the Persian Gulf, together, hold 788 billion barrels, over half of world’s 1477 billion barrels proven oil reserves.
In many ways, the current oil crunch caused by Washington’s unilateral decision to impose economic sanctions on Russia’s vital energy sector is similar to the oil crisis of 1973. The 1973 collective Arab oil embargo against the West following the Arab-Israel War lasted only for a short span of six months during which the price of oil quadrupled, but Washington became so paranoid after the embargo that it put in place a ban on the export of crude oil outside the US borders, and began keeping sixty-day stock of reserve fuel for strategic and military needs dubbed the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR).
Regarding the reciprocal relationship between Washington and the Gulf’s autocrats, it bears mentioning that in April 2016, the Saudi foreign minister threatened that the Saudi kingdom would sell up to $750 billion in treasury securities and other assets if the US Congress passed a bill that would allow Americans to sue the Saudi government in the United States courts for its role in the September 11, 2001 terror attack – though the bill was eventually passed, Saudi authorities have not been held accountable for nurturing terrorism.
It’s noteworthy that $750 billion was only the Saudi investment in the United States, if we add its investment in the Western Europe and the investments of the oil-rich U.A.E, Kuwait and Qatar in the Western economies, the sum total would amount to trillions of dollars of Gulf’s investments in the economies of North America and Western Europe.
Additionally, regarding the Western defense production industry’s sales of arms to the Gulf Arab States, a report authored by William Hartung of the US-based Center for International Policy found that the Obama administration had offered Saudi Arabia more than $115 billion in weapons, military equipment and training during its eight-year tenure.
Similarly, the top items in Trump’s agenda for his maiden visit to Saudi Arabia in May 2017 were: firstly, he threw his weight behind the idea of the Saudi-led “Arab NATO” to counter Iran’s influence in the region; and secondly, he announced an unprecedented arms package for Saudi Arabia.
The package included between $98 billion and $128 billion in arms sales and, over a period of 10 years, total sales could reach $400 billion, as Donald Trump himself alluded to in his conversations with American journalist Bob Woodward described in the book Rage.
President Donald Trump boasted that he protected Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman from congressional scrutiny after the brutal assassination of Saudi dissident Jamal Khashoggi, who was murdered at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul in October 2018.
“I saved his ass,” Trump said in 2018, according to the book. “I was able to get Congress to leave him alone. I was able to get them to stop.” When Woodward pressed Trump if he believed the Saudi crown prince ordered the assassination himself, Trump responded: “He says very strongly that he didn’t do it. Bob, they spent $400 billion over a fairly short period of time,” Trump said.
“And you know, they’re in the Middle East. You know, they’re big. Because of their religious monuments, you know, they have the real power. They have the oil, but they also have the great monuments for religion. You know that, right? For that religion,” Trump noted. “They wouldn’t last a week if we’re not there, and they know it,” he added.
In this reciprocal relationship, the US provides security to the ruling families of the Gulf Arab States by providing weapons and troops; and in return, the Gulf’s petro-sheikhs contribute substantial investments to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars to the Western economies.
All the recent wars and conflicts aside, the unholy alliance between the Western powers and the Gulf’s petro-monarchies is much older. The British Empire stirred uprising in Arabia by instigating the Sharifs of Mecca to rebel against the Ottoman rule during the First World War, as the Ottoman Empire had sided with Germany during the war.
After the Ottoman Empire collapsed following the war, the British Empire backed King Abdul Aziz (Ibn-e-Saud) in his violent insurgency against Sharif of Mecca Hussein bin Ali, because the latter was demanding too much of a price for his loyalty, the unification of the whole of Arabian peninsula, including the Levant, Iraq and the Gulf Emirates, under his suzerainty as a bribe for stabbing the Ottoman Empire in the back during the First World War.
Consequently, the Western powers abandoned the Sharifs of Mecca, though the scions of the family were rewarded with kingdoms in Iraq and Jordan, imposed the Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916 dividing Arabs into small states at loggerheads with each other, and lent their support to the nomadic Sauds of Najd.
King Abdul Aziz defeated the Sharifs and united his dominions into the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in 1932 with the financial and military support of the British Empire. However, by then the tide of the British Imperialism was subsiding and the Americans inherited the former territorial possessions of the British Empire.
At the end of the Second World War on 14 February 1945, President Franklin D. Roosevelt held a historic meeting with King Abdul Aziz at Great Bitter Lake in the Suez Canal onboard USS Quincy, and laid the foundations of an enduring alliance which persists to this day. During the course of that momentous meeting, among other things, it was decided to set up the United States Military Training Mission (USMTM) to Saudi Arabia to “train, advise and assist” the Saudi Arabian Armed Forces.
Aside from USMTM, the US-based Vinnell Corporation, which is a private military company based in the US and a subsidiary of the Northrop Grumman, used over a thousand Vietnam War veterans to train and equip 125,000 strong Saudi Arabian National Guards (SANG) which is not under the authority of the Saudi Ministry of Defense and acts as the Praetorian Guards of the House of Saud.
In addition, the Critical Infrastructure Protection Force, whose strength is numbered in tens of thousands, is also being trained and equipped by the US to guard the critical Saudi oil infrastructure along its eastern Persian Gulf coast where 90% of 266 billion barrels Saudi oil reserves are located.
Currently, the US has deployed tens of thousands of American troops in aircraft carriers and numerous military bases in the Persian Gulf that include sprawling al-Dhafra airbase in Abu Dhabi, al-Udeid airbase in Qatar and a naval base in Bahrain where the Fifth Fleet of the US Navy is based.
The September 2021 Scientific American included a description by the editors of the deplorable state of disaster relief in the US. They traced the root cause of problems with relief programs as their “focus on restoring private property,” which results in little attention to those “with the least capacity to deal with disasters.” The book Disaster Preparedness and Climate Change in Cuba: Adaptation and Management (2021) comes out the next month. It traced the highly successful source of the island nation’s efforts to the way it put human welfare above property. This collection of 14 essays by Emily J. Kirk, Isabel Story, and Anna Clayfield is an extraordinary assemblage of articles, each addressing specific issues.
Writers are well aware that Cuban approaches are adapted to the unique geography and history of the island. What readers should take away is not so much the specific actions of Cuba as its method of studying a wide array of approaches and actually putting the best into effect (as opposed to merely talking about their strengths and weaknesses). The book traces Cuba’s preparedness from the threat of a US invasion following its revolution through its resistance to hurricanes and diseases, which all laid the foundation for current adaptions to climate change.
Only four years after the revolution, in 1963, Hurricane Flora hit the Caribbean, killing 7000-8000. Cubans who are old enough remember homes being washed away by waters carrying rotten food, animal carcasses and human bodies. It sparked a complete redesign of health systems, intensifying their integration from the highest decision-making bodies to local health centers. Construction standards were strengthened, requiring houses to have reinforced concrete and metal roofs to resist strong winds.
Decades of re-designing proved successful. In September 2017 Category 5 Hurricane Maria pounded Puerto Rico, leading to 2975 deaths. The same month, Irma, also a Category 5 Hurricane, arrived in Cuba, causing 10 deaths. The dedication to actually preparing the country for a hurricane (as opposed to merely talking about preparedness) became a model for coping with climate change. Projecting potential future damage led Cubans to to realize that by 2050, rising water levels could destroy 122 coastal towns. By 2017, Cuba had become the only country with a government-led plan (Project Life, or Tarea Vida) to combat climate change which includes a 100 year projection.
Disaster Planning
Several aspects merged to form the core of Cuban disaster planning. They included education, the military, and social relationships. During 1961, Cuba’s signature campaign raised literacy to 96%, one of the world’s highest rates. This has been central to every aspect of disaster preparation – government officials and educators travel throughout the island, explaining consequences of inaction and everyone’s role in avoiding catastrophe.
Less obvious is the critical role of the military. From the first days they took power, leaders such as Fidel and Che explained that the only way the revolution could defend itself from overwhelming US force would be to become a “nation in arms.” Soon self-defense from hurricanes combined with self-defense from attack and Cuban armed forces became a permanent part of fighting natural disasters. By 1980, exercises called Bastión (bulwark) fused natural disaster management with defense rehearsals.
As many as 4 million Cubans (in a population of 11 million) were involved in activities to practice and carry out food production, disease control, sanitation and safeguarding medical supplies. A culture based on understanding the need to create a new society has glued these actions together. When a policy change is introduced, government representatives go to each community, including the most remote rural ones, to make sure that everyone knows the threats that climate change poses to their lives and how they can alter behaviors to minimize them. Developing a sense of responsibility for ecosystems includes such diverse actions as conserving energy, saving water, preventing fires and using medical products sparingly.
Contradictions
One aspect of the book may confuse readers. Some authors refer to the Cuban disaster prevention system as “centralized;” others refer to it as “decentralized;” and some describe it as both “centralized” and “decentralized” on different pages of their essay. The collection reflects a methodology of “dialectical materialism” which often employs the unity of opposite processes (“heads” and “tails” are opposite static states united in the concept of “coin”). As multiple authors have explained, including Ross Danielson in his classic Cuban Medicine (1979), centralization and decentralization of medicine have gone hand-in-hand since the earliest days of the revolution. This may appear as centralization of inpatient care and decentralization of outpatient care (p. 165) but more often as centralization at the highest level of norms and decentralization of ways to implement care to the local level. The decision to create doctor-nurse offices was made by the ministry which provided guidelines for each area to implement according to local conditions.
A national plan for coping with Covid-19 was developed before the first Cuban died of the affliction and each area designed ways to to get needed medicines, vaccines and other necessities to their communities. Proposals for preventing water salinization in coastal areas will be very different from schemas for coping with rises in temperature in inland communities.
Challenges for Producing Energy: The Good
As non-stop use of fossil fuels renders the continued existence of humanity questionable, the issue of how to obtain energy rationally looms as a core problem of the twenty-first century. Disaster Preparedness explores an intriguing variety of energy sources. Some of them are outstandingly good; a few are bad; and, many provoke closer examination.
Raúl Castro proposed in 1980 that it was necessary to protect the countryside from impacts of nickel mining. What was critical in this early approach was an understanding that every type of metal extraction has negatives that must be weighed against its usefulness in order to minimize those negatives. What did not appear in his approach was making a virtue of necessity, which would have read “Cuba needs nickel for trade; therefore, extracting Cuban nickel is good; and, thus, problems with producing nickel should be ignored or trivialized.”
In 1991, when the USSR collapsed and Cuba lost its subsidies and many of its trading partners, its economy was devastated, adult males lost an average of 20 pounds, and health problems became widespread. This was Cuba’s “Special Period.” Not having oil meant that Cuba had to abandon machine-intensive agriculture for agroecology and urban farming.
Laws prohibited use of agrochemicals in urban gardens. Vegetable and herb production exploded from 4000 tons in 1994 to over 4 million tons by 2006. By 2019, Jason Hickel’s Sustainable Development Index rated Cuba’s ecological efficiency as the best in the world.
By far the most important part of Cuba’s energy program was using less energy via conservation, an idea abandoned by Western “environmentalists” who began endorsing unlimited expansion of energy produced by “alternative” sources. In 2005, Fidel began pushing conservation policies projected to reduce Cuba’s energy consumption by two-thirds. Ideas such these had blossomed during the first few years of the revolution.
What one author refers to as “bioclimatic architecture” is not clear, but it could include tile vaulting, which was studied extensively by the Cuban government in the early 1960s. It is based on arched ceilings formed by lightweight terra cotta tiles. The technique is low-carbon because it does not require expensive machinery and uses mainly local material such as terra cotta tiles from Camagüey province. Though used to construct buildings throughout the island, it was abandoned due to its need for skilled and specialized labor.
Challenges for Producing Energy: The Bad
Though there are negative aspects to Cuba’s energy perspectives, it is important to consider one which is anything but negative: energy efficiency (EE). Ever since Stanley Jevons predicted in 1865 that a more efficient steam engine design would result in more (not less) coal being used, it has been widely understood that if the price of energy (such as burning coal) is cheaper, then people will use more energy.
A considerable amount of research verifies that, at the level of the entire economy, efficiency makes energy cheaper and its use goes up. Some claim that if an individual uses a more EE option, then that person will use less energy. But that is not necessarily so. Someone buying a car might look for one that is more EE. If the person replaces a non-EE sedan with an EE SUV, the fact that SUVs use more energy than sedans would mean that the person is using more energy to get around. Similarly, rich people use money saved from EE devices to buy more gadgets while poor people might not buy anything additional or buy low-energy necessities.
This is why Cuba, a poor country with a planned economy, can design policies to reduce energy use. Whatever is saved from EE can lead to less or low-energy production, resulting in a spiraling down of energy usage. In contrast, competition drives capitalist economies toward investing funds saved from EE toward economic expansion, resulting in perpetual growth.
Though a planned economy allows for decisions that are healthier for people and ecosystems, bad choices can be made. One consideration in Cuba is the goal to “efficiently apply pesticides” (p. 171). The focus should actually be on how to farm without pesticides. Also under consideration is “solid waste energy capacities,” which is typically a euphemism for burning waste in incinerators. Incinerators are a terrible way to produce energy since they merely reduce the volume of trash to 10% of its original size while releasing poisonous gases, heavy metals (such as mercury and lead), and cancer-causing dioxins and furans.
The worst energy alternative was favored by Fidel, who supported a nuclear power plant which would supposedly “greatly reduce the cost of producing electricity.” (p. 187) Had the Soviets built a Chernobyl-type nuclear reactor, an explosion or two would not have contributed to disaster prevention. Once when I was discussing the suffering following the USSR collapse with a friend who writes technical documents for the Cuban government, he suddenly blurted out, “The only good thing coming out of the Special Period was that, without the Soviets, Fidel could not build his damned nuclear plant!”
Challenges for Producing Energy: The Uncertain
Between the poles of positive and negative lies a vast array of alternatives mentioned in Disaster Preparedness that most are unfamiliar with. There are probably few who know of bagasse, which is left over sugar cane stalks that have been squeezed for juice. Burning it for fuel might arouse concern because it is not plowed into soil like what should be done for wheat stems and corn stalks. Sugar cane is different because the entire plant is hauled away – it would waste fuel to transport it to squeezing machinery and then haul it back to the farm.
While fuel from bagasse is an overall environmental plus, the same cannot be said for oilseeds such as Jatropha curcas. Despite the book suggesting the they might be researched more, they are a dead end for energy production.
Another energy positive being expanded in Cuba is farms being run entirely on agroecology principles. The book claims that such farms can produce 12 times the energy they consume, which might seem like a lot. Yet, similar findings occur in other countries, notably Sweden. In contrast, at least one author holds out hope of obtaining energy from microalgae, almost certainly another dead end.
Potentially, a very promising source for energy is the use of biogas from biodigesters. Biodigesters break down manure and other biomass to create biogas which is used for tractors or transportation. Leftover solid waste material can be used as a (non-fossil fuel) fertilizer. On the other hand, an energy source which one author lists as viable is highly dubious: “solar cells built with gallum arsenide.” Compounds with arsenic are cancer-causing and not healthy for humans and other living species.
The word “biomass” is highly charged because it is one of Europe’s “clean, green” energy sources despite the fact that burning wood pellets is leading to deforestation in Estonia and the US. This does not seem to be the case in Cuba, where “biomass” refers to sawdust and weedy marabú trees. It remains important to distinguish positive biomass from highly destructive biomass.
Many other forms of alternative energy could be covered and there is a critical point applying to all of them. Each source of energy must be analyzed separately without ever assuming that if energy does not come from fossil fuels it is therefore useful and safe.
Depending on How You Get It
The three major sources of alternative energy – hydroturbines (dams), solar, and wind – share the characteristic that how positive or negative they are depends on the way they are obtained.
The simplest form of hydro power is the paddle wheel, which probably causes zero environmental damage and produces very little energy. At the other extreme is hydro-electric dams which cross entire rivers and are incredibly destructive towards human cultures and aquatic and terrestrial species. In between are methods such as diverting a portion of the river to harness its power. The book mentions pico-hydroturbines which affect only a portion of a river, generating less than 5kW and are extremely useful for remote areas. They have minimal environmental effects. But if a large number of these turbines were placed together in a river, that would be a different matter. The general rule for water power is that causing less environmental damage means producing less energy.
Many ways to produce energy start with the sun. Cuba uses passive solar techniques, which do not have toxic processes associated with electricity. A passivehaus design provides warmth largely via insulation and placement of windows. Extremely important is body heat. This makes a passivhaus difficult for Americans, whose homes typically have much more space per person than other countries. But the design could work better in Cuba, where having three generations living together in a smaller space would contribute to heating quite well.
At the negative extreme of solar energy are the land-hungry electricity-generating arrays. In between these poles is low-intensity solar power, also being studied by Cuba.
The vast majority of Cubans heat their water for bathing. Water heaters can depend on solar panels which turn sunlight into electricity. An even better non-electric design would be to use a box with glass doors and a black tank to collect heat, or to use “flat plate collectors” and then pipe the heated water to an indoor storage tank. As with hydro-power, simpler designs produce fewer problems but generate less energy.
Wind power is highly similar. Centuries ago, windmills were constructed with materials from the surrounding area and did not rely on or produce toxins. Today’s industrial wind turbines are toxic in every phase of their existence. In the ambiguous category are small wind turbines and wind pumps, both of which Cuba is exploring. What hydro, solar and wind power have in common is that non-destructive forms exist but produce less energy. The more energy-producing a system is, the more problematic it becomes.
Scuttling the Fetish
Since hydro, solar and wind power have reputations as “renewable, clean, green” sources of energy, it is necessary to examine them closely. Hydro, solar and wind power each require destructive extraction of materials such as lithium, cobalt, silver, aluminum, cadmium, indium, gallium, selenium, tellurium, neodymium, and dysprosium. All three lead to mountains of toxic waste that vastly exceed the amount obtained for use. And all require withdrawal of immense amounts of water (a rapidly vanishing substance) during the mining and construction.
Hydro-power also disrupts aquatic species (as well as several terrestrial ones), causes large releases of greenhouse gases (GHGs) from reservoirs, increases mercury poisoning, pushes people out of their homes during construction, intensifies international conflicts, and have killed up to 26,000 people from breakage. Silicon-based solar panels involves an additional list of toxic chemicals that can poison workers during manufacture, gargantuan loss of farm and forest land for installing “arrays” (which rapidly increases over time), and still more land loss for disposal after their 25-30 year life spans. Industrial wind turbines require loss of forest land for roads to haul 160 foot blades to mountain tops, land loss for depositing those mammoth blades after use, and energy-intensive storage capacity when there is no wind.
Hydro, solar and wind power are definitely NOT renewable, since they all are based on heavy usage of materials that are exhausted following continuous mining. Neither are they “carbon neutral” because all use fossil fuels for extraction of necessary building materials and end-of-life demolition. The most important point is that the issues listed here are a tiny fraction of total problems, which would require a very thick book to enumerate.
Why use the word “fetish” for approaches to hydro, solar and wind power? A “fetish” can be described as “a material object regarded with extravagant trust or reverence” These sources of energy have positive characteristics, but nothing like the reverence often bestowed upon them.
Cuba’s approach to alternative energy is quite different. Helen Yaffe wrote two of the major articles in Disaster Preparedness. She also put together the 2021 documentary, Cuba’s life task: Combatting climate change, which includes the following from advisor Orlando Rey Santos:
“One problem today is that you cannot convert the world’s energy matrix, with current consumption levels, from fossil fuels to renewable energies. There are not enough resources for the panels and wind turbines, nor the space for them. There are insufficient resources for all this. If you automatically made all transportation electric tomorrow, you will continue to have the same problems of congestion, parking, highways, heavy consumption of steel and cement.”
Cuba maps out many different outlines for energy in order to focus on those that are the most productive while causing the least damage. A genuine environmental approach requires a Life Cycle Analysis (LCA, also known as cradle-to-grave accounting) which includes all mining, milling, construction and transport of materials; the energy-gathering process itself (including environmental disruption); along with after-effects such as continuing environmental damage and disposal of waste. To these must be added social effects such as relocating people, injury and death of those resisting relocation, destruction of sacred cites and disruption of affected cultures.
A “fetish” on a specific energy source denotes tunnel-visioning on its use phase while ignoring preparatory and end-of-life phases and social disruption. While LCAs are often propounded by corporations, they are typically nothing but window-dressing, to be pitched out of window during actual decision-making. With an eternal growth dynamic, capitalism has a built-in tendency to downplay negatives when there is an opportunity to add new energy sources to the mix of fossil fuels.
Is It an Obscene Word?
Cuba has no such internal dynamics forcing it to expand the economy if it can provide better lives for all. The island could be a case study of degrowth economics. Since “degrowth” is shunned as a quasi-obscenity by many who insist that it would cause immeasurable suffering for the world’s poor, it is necessary to state what it would be. The best definition is that Global Economic Degrowth means (a) reduction of unnecessary and destructive production by and for rich countries (and people), (b) which exceeds the (c) growth of production of necessities by and for poor countries (and people).
This might not be as economically difficult as some imagine because …
1. The rich world spends such gargantuan wealth on that which is useless and deadly, including war toys, chemical poisons, planned obsolescence, creative destruction of goods, insurance, automobile addiction, among a mass of examples; and,
Some mischaracterize degrowth, claiming that “Cuba experienced ‘degrowth’ during its ‘Special Period’ and it was horrible.” Wrong! Degrowth did not immiserate Cuba – the US embargo did. US sanctions (or embargo or blockade) of Cuba creates barriers to trade which force absurdly high prices for many goods. One small example: If Cubans need a spare part manufactured in the US, it cannot be merely shipped from the US, but more likely, arrives via Europe. That means its cost will reflect: [manufacture] + [cost of shipping to Europe] + [cost of shipping from Europe to Cuba].
What is amazing is that Cuba has developed so many techniques of medical care and disaster management for hurricanes and climate change, despite its double impoverishment from colonial days and neo-colonial attacks from the US.
Daydreaming
Cuba realizes the responsibility it has to protect its extraordinary biodiversity. Its extensive coral reefs are more resistant to bleaching than most and must be investigated to discover why. They are accompanied by healthy marine systems which include mangroves and seagrass beds. Its flora and fauna boast 3022 distinct plant species plus dozens of reptiles, amphibians and bird species which exist only on the island.
For Cuba to implement global environmental protection and degrowth policies it would need to receive financing both to research new techniques and to train the world’s poor in how to develop their own ways to live better. Such financial support would include …
1. Reparations for centuries of colonial plunder;
2. Reparations for the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion, multiple attacks which killed Cuban citizens, hundreds of attempts on Fidel’s life, and decades of slanderous propaganda; and,
Why reparations? It is far more than the fact that Cuba has been harmed intensely by the US. Cuba has a track record proving that it could develop amazing technologies if it were left alone and received the money it deserves.
Like all poor countries, Cuba is forced to employ dubious methods of producing energy in order to survive. It is unacceptable for rich countries to tell poor countries that they must not use energy techniques which have historically been employed to obtain what is necessary for living. It is unconscionable for rich countries to fail to forewarn poor countries that repeating practices which we now know are dangerous will leave horrible legacies for their descendants.
Cuba has acknowledged past misdirections including an economy based on sugar, a belief in the need of humanity to dominate nature, support for the “Green Revolution” with its reliance on toxic chemicals, tobacco in food rations, and the repression of homosexuals. Unless it is sidetracked by by advocates of infinite economic growth, its pattern suggests that it will recognize problems with alternative energy and seek to avoid them.
In the video Cuba’s Life Task, Orlando Rey also observes that “There must be a change in the way of life, in our aspirations. This is a part of Che Guevara’s ideas on the ‘new man.’ Without forming that new human, it is very difficult to confront the climate issue.”
Integration of poor countries into the global market has meant that areas which were once able to feed themselves are are now unable to do so. Neo-liberalism forces them to use energy sources that are life-preservers in the short run but are death machines for their descendants. The world must remember that Che’s “new man” will not clamor for frivolous luxuries while others starve. For humanity to survive, a global epiphany rejecting consumer capitalism must become a material force in energy production. Was Che only dreaming? If so, then keep that dream alive!
Don Fitz (moc.loanull@nodztif)is on the Editorial Board of Green Social Thought, where a version of this article originally appeared. He was the 2016 candidate of the Missouri Green Party for Governor. His articles on politics and the environment have appeared in Monthly Review, Z Magazine, and Green Social Thought, as well as multiple online publications. His book, Cuban Health Care: The Ongoing Revolution, has been available since June 2020. Thoughts from Stan Cox and John Som de Cerff were very helpful for technical aspects of this review.
It was sort of like New Year’s Eve, except it was agreed it should be a simultaneous moment all over the Earth. Having it be the same very moment for all seemed right, it was important to feel the connection with everyone and everything. So the time came and we listened to the voices on our phones. We are the children of the planet, we are going to sing its praises all together, all at once, now is the time to express our love, to take the responsibilities that come with being stewards of the earth, devotees of this sacred space, one planet, one planet, on and on it went…
— Kim Stanley Robinson, The Ministry of the Future, p. 537-538
As I read through prolific science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson’s most recent novel, The Ministry of the Future, first published in October of 2020, I began thinking: why didn’t I learn about this before now, the beginning of 2022? Because if you are a person who gets it on the seriousness of the climate emergency we are in, this is nothing less than an absolute must-read.
After you read this book you’ll appreciate that, no, it’s not too late. Yes, there is hope that we can slow, stop and reverse global overheating and in the process truly change our world for the better. There is hope that our children and grandchildren and the seven generations coming after us will have lives better than the ones we are experiencing today. Yes, there is hope for the human race and all life forms on earth.
Hope, hope grounded in an objective and scientific assessment of reality, is a powerful thing. No progressive revolutions have ever been made by hopeless people.
Robinson’s 564 page masterpiece begins in the middle of the current 2020s decade with a world-changing extreme weather event, a deadly heat wave in India which causes 20 million deaths, which in turn leads to a political revolution within India and a new progressive national government which, for the first time in the history of nation states, takes action to address the climate emergency at the scale needed. This was the turning point for the world.
25 years later, the earth’s physical reality had reversed course, first by the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere plateauing, and then, over a five year period, going down each year for a total of 27 parts per million, from 478 to 451 ppm. And with that huge accomplishment—or because of what made that accomplishment possible—the lives of people and all life forms on the planet had taken a definite turn for the better.
What, more specifically, happened that led to this huge result?
Some of it was not surprising: “increasingly stringent standards for carbon emissions among the six biggest emitting sectors: industry, transport, land use, buildings, transportation, and cross-sector” (p. 251)—a dramatic shift away from fossil fuels to clean, renewable energy as the primary energy source—widespread socialization of energy, ending it being a commodity for private profit—the substitution of energy efficient ships, planes and land vehicles for transportation, like mainly wind-powered “clipper ships” for ocean and river transport—and more:
“Regenerative ag, landscape restoration, wildlife stewardship, Mondragon-style co-ops, garden cities, universal basic income and services, job guarantees, refugee release and repatriation, climate justice and equity actions, first people support, all these tended to be regional or localized, but they were happening everywhere, and more than ever before.” (p. 455)
And there was much more, many positive environmental, social, economic and cultural changes.
How did it happen?
Absolutely key was the building and maintaining of broad coalitions of sectors of society who, in their massive numbers, made it increasingly difficult for the powers that be to not change.
One key tactic was massive occupations: “Despite this sense that the world was falling apart, or maybe because of it, demonstrations in the capitals of the world intensified. Actually these seemed to be occupations rather than demonstrations, because they didn’t end but rather persisted as disruptions of the ordinary business of the capitals. Within the occupied spaces, people were setting up and performing alternative lifeways with gift supplies of food and impromptu shelter and toilet facilities, all provided or enacted by the participants as if in some kind of game or theater piece, designed mainly to allow unceasing discourse demanding the official governments respond to the needs of their people rather than to the needs of global capital; and the governments involved had to face either siccing their police and militaries on their own people, or waiting out the occupations for what could be months, or actually changing in the way demanded. Time to dismiss the people and elect another one! as Brecht had so trenchantly phrased it.” (p. 286-287)
It happened via geoengineering, not a popular thing among more than a few climate activists. What were the specifics? It began after the 20 million heat wave deaths in India when, in response to popular outrage and pressure, the Indian government sprayed sulfur dioxide above and over the country to reflect sunlight away from the earth’s surface. It worked; and in the book it had little negative impact. A second, less controversial tactic was to spend tens of billions of dollars to drain water from the base of the great ice masses in Antarctica and Greenland. Doing so stabilized them and dramatically reduced sea level rise.
It happened through carbon taxes and through directly taking on the immense power of the world’s largest private banks. Some were nationalized. But the most effective way was through their being forced by massive, widespread political pressure, violent pro-earth terrorism (see below) and leadership by some within the system to bring them around to acceptance of a new, worldwide form of currency to replace, over time, dollars and marks and francs and pesos and all the others: a currency valued and accepted because it was based on investments in carbon drawdowns. A carbon currency. Carbon coins. “The new carbon coin had stimulated many short-term investments in carbon sequestration projects, and many longer-term investments in the coin itself. It had caused some of the biggest carbon owners to cash out and keep fossil carbon in the ground… They had created and paid out trillions of carbon coins, and yet had seen no signs of inflation, or deflation, for those who held that theory; no noticeable price change.” (p. 420-421)
And then there was the tactic of selective but violent terrorism, eco-terrorism, begun in India after the great heat wave die off. “It was a question of identifying the guilty [overwhelmingly the fossil fuel CEO types] and then finding them and getting to them. Methods were worked up over many iterations. Drones were best. Much of the job becomes intelligence; finding the guilty, finding their moments of exposure. Not easy, but once accomplished, boom. The drones keep getting faster and faster. The guilty often have defenses, but these can often be overwhelmed by numbers. The guilty died by the dozens in those years. Eventually, a decade into the campaign, they knew they were in trouble. The only thing we worried about was what the guilty ones always call ‘collateral damage.’ In other words, the accidental killing of innocents to kill your target. [We] were very fair and very meticulous. If to kill a hundred guilty you had to kill one innocent, no. It’s against the law.” (p. 135-136)
As someone not a pacifist but who believes that nonviolent tactics are generally the most effective and quickest way to build strong movements, this was the part of the book that I had the most trouble with. Relatedly, I was also troubled that there was nothing in it about the increasingly effective and continuing movements in the USA and elsewhere in the world to prevent the expansion of new fossil fuel infrastructure, like the Indigenous-led resistance to the KXL and Dakota Access and Line 3 and Line 5 tar sands oil pipelines, or the movement to stop expansion of the vast array of methane gas pipelines and infrastructure—gas is 86 times as powerful as CO2 over a 20 year time period–all over the US and elsewhere, the expansion of coastal terminals to ship out and ship in gas. There is a strong movement in the US against all of that, winning victories, preventing more and more of these from being built or putting up major, public battles to do so. Without question, the success of this movement can and will limit the power of the fossil fuel CEO’s and their financial backers to keep expanding. It will accelerate the needed shift away from fossil fuels to renewables, battery storage, energy efficiency and more.
Nonviolent tactics have been used to go after, to shame, to publicly embarrass and expose individual heads of corporations and heads of energy regulatory agencies. They have been visited at their homes. People have slept out overnight in front of their homes. Neighbors have been leafletted about the crimes committed by their neighbor. In years past powerful people have been “pied,” had a cream pie pushed into their face while in public.
And I am sure there are similar nonviolent tactics along these lines that exist or that could be evolved if they increasingly became seen as an important component of building the bottom-up movement which is an essential if Robinson’s vision, our collective vision, our rising demand for a new world is to come to be.
Hopefully, 25 years on, when the history of how the world changed over these years is written, Robinson’s book will be one of the things historians reference as to what helped to change it. Thank you, Kim Stanley Robinson.
Toronto, Ontario, Canada — This morning, Toronto supporters of the Wet’suwet’en land defense struggle against the Coastal Gaslink pipeline set up construction sites at the Toronto homes of TC Energy Board Chair Siim Vanaselja and Royal Bank of Canada Executive Doug Guzman. The supporters also flyered the neighborhood with photos of the two men with signs warning, “Your neighbour is pushing the Coastal Gaslink pipeline through Wet’suwet’en Territory at gunpoint.”
Rachel Small, Canada Organizer for World BEYOND War, said, “Today supporters took action to bring the message home to Siim Vanaselja and Doug Guzman, two men leading companies that are orchestrating, funding, and profiting off of the violent colonial invasion of unceded Wet’suwet’en territory. The decisions they make are directly linked to the militarized violence that the RCMP has carried out on Wet’suwet’en people over the past several months to shove through the Coastal Gaslink pipeline at gunpoint.”
In November, RCMP deployed military-style police units – including snipers, heavily-armed assault teams, and canine units – against unarmed Wet’suwet’en land defenders during a raid on land defense camps set up to stop pipeline construction crews from drilling under the Wedzin Kwa river. During these raids, the RCMP destroyed several of the land defenders’ homes, using axes and a chainsaw, and burned one home to the ground.
“The home of my sister, Jocelyn Alec, was burned down and bulldozed after she was violently arrested and removed at gunpoint,” said Wet’suwet’en Land Defender Eve Saint. “She is the daughter of Hereditary Chief Woos, and her home was on our traditional, unceded Wet’suwet’en territory.”
Rachelle Friesen from Community Peacemaker Teams expressed support for the action, “We can’t stand by and let executives like Siim and Doug continue to ignore the impacts of their decisions while militarized police force through their investments. Across Turtle Island people are rising up to show that we will not back down until the Coastal Gaslink pipeline project and the RCMP leave Wet’suwet’en territory.”
TC Energy is constructing Coastal GasLink, a $6.6 billion dollar 670 km pipeline that would transport fracked gas in northeastern B.C. to a $40 billion LNG terminal on B.C.’s North Coast. The project runs through the unceded territory of the Wet’suwet’en Nation and has been met with ongoing resistance from the nation’s hereditary leadership who hold authority over traditional territories. Wet’suwet’en land defenders and their supporters have vowed that they will not allow construction to continue on unceded Wet’suwet’en territory without the consent of Wet’suwet’en Hereditary Chiefs.
RBC is one of the Coastal GasLink pipeline’s primary financiers, and played a leading role in securing the project finance package that would cover up to 80% of the pipeline’s construction costs.
On January 4, 2020, Wet’suwet’en Hereditary Chiefs issued an eviction order to Coastal GasLink, which one of the nation’s five clans, the Gidimt’en, enforced in November by blocking roads and preventing pipeline workers from accessing work sites. The eviction orders Coastal GasLink to remove themselves from the territory and not return and highlights that TC Energy’s construction on Wet’suwet’en land ignores the jurisdiction and authority of Hereditary Chiefs and the feast system of governance, which was recognized by the Supreme Court of Canada in 1997.
Said Gidimt’en spokesperson Sleydo’ of the ongoing invasion of unceded Wet’suwet’en territory, “It’s infuriating, it’s illegal, even according to their own means of colonial law. We need to shut down Canada.”
Members of the Gidimt’en clan ordered all Coastal GasLink employees to leave the Wet’suwet’en territory in the interior of British Columbia on Sunday in a move the company said contradicts a court order.
Starting at 5 am Sunday, the clan told workers they had eight hours to “peacefully evacuate” the area before the main road into the Lhudis Bin territory was closed at 1 pm.
Words can provide sharp traps, fettering language and caging definitions. They can also speak to freedom of action and permissiveness. At COP26, that permissiveness was all the more present in the haggling ahead of what would become the Glasgow Climate Pact.
COP26, or the UN Climate Change Conference UK 2021, had a mission of “Uniting the world to tackle climate change.” The tackling, however, fell rather short, though countries, in the main, were trying to sell the final understanding as a grand compromise of mature tidiness. COP26 president Alok Sharma called the outcome “a fragile win”, the outcome of “hard work” and “great cooperation” from the parties.
The Pact is a flurry of words, acknowledging, for instance “the importance of the best available science for effective climate action and policymaking.” Alarm and utmost concern is expressed by the parties at the fact “that human activities have caused around 1.1 °C of global warming to date and that impacts are already being felt in every region”. There is a stress on “the urgency of enhancing ambition and acting in relation to mitigation adaptation and finance in this critical decade to address gaps between current efforts and pathways in pursuit of the ultimate objective of the Convention and its long-term global goal”.
The pact had gone through a few iterations, stirring interest, sparking hope, even inducing, at points, a giddy optimism. The first draft had called upon the Parties “to accelerate the phasing-out of coal and subsidies for fossil-fuels”. Its appearance was considered by The New Scientist to be “remarkable” for explicitly mentioning fossil fuels, while Ed King of the European Climate Foundation suggested that it was “the first time fossil fuels have been called out in a draft UN climate decision text”.
But in the final statement, an exit for countries still keen to keep the heart of coal alive, was carved. The parties might well ensure that technologies and policies would be adopted “to transition towards low-emission energy systems”, scale up the “deployment of clean power generation and energy efficiency measures” but this would also entail “accelerating efforts towards the phasedown of unabated coal power and phase-out of inefficient fossil fuel subsidies”. As this was undertaken, “targeted support” would be directed towards “the poorest and most vulnerable in line with national circumstances and recognizing the need for support towards a just transition”.
And there were those words slipped in with conspiratorial deftness: “phasing down”. Elastic, open, accommodating to the emitters and the vendors. A world left to the beholder. The change of language had been encouraged by India, with the support of other coal-dependent states. The Indian environment and climate minister, Bhupender Yadav, had been less than impressed with the singling out of coal, given the previous text’s deafening silence on natural gas and oil.
The reasons for such omissions were clear enough: countries such as the United States continue to nourish their interest in oil and gas investment. On November 17, the Biden administration will hold the largest offshore oil and gas lease sale in US history, covering 80 million acres off the Gulf of Mexico. Again, President Joe Biden shows that anything his predecessor, Donald Trump, did, he can do several times better.
After the conclusion of COP26, Yadav merrily declared the summit a success for India, as “we articulated and put across the concerns and ideas of the developing world quite succinctly and unequivocally.” His country had a lesson for the developed world, fattened by a certain lifestyle that required modification to cope with the climate crisis.
It was the hook upon which the Modi government could fasten a new, lecturing mantra: LIFE, or Lifestyle for Environment, one that valued “moderation over excess.” “Today,” stated Prime Minister Narendra Modi at the summit, “it’s needed that all of us come together and take forward LIFE as a movement.” Presumably a phasing down movement.
Indian voices in the climate action sector did not shy away from approving the dilution of the language on coal. Their targets were the misdeeds of the United States and the European Union, who had, according to Aarti Khosla of Climate Trends, failed “to deliver on the promised $100 billion in climate finance”. Kamal Narayan, CEO of the Integrated Health and Well Being Council, suggested that the use of “phasing down” coal instead of “phasing out” should not be a source of concern, given “the kind of commitment and leadership India has shown in building renewable energy infrastructure”.
While not quite music, the softening approach in the final text was melodious enough for former Australian resources minister Matt Canavan to claim that the coal industry had been victorious in Scotland. Proudly visible before him in an interview with the Today program was a screen with an unequivocal message: “Glasgow: A Huge Win for Coal.” An adventurous reading of the Glasgow text was in order. The agreement had provided “wiggle room” for countries. “Given the fact that the agreement did not say that coal needs to be phased down or taken out, it is a green light for us to build more coal mines.”
For a delightedly cynical Canavan, no country was really taking the agreement seriously, and the likes of India, China and those in South-East Asia were insatiably hungry for coal, with a “demand” that “almost has no limit”. On Twitter, he reiterated the theme with a call to rent the earth with urgent, patriotic enthusiasm. “Let’s get digging then and sell more of the best coal in the world to others, and bring millions more people out of poverty.”
Pacific Island states were resigned, disappointed and despairing. Fiji’s Prime Minister Frank Bainimarama could only entertain some frail optimism, praising the “heroic effort” of the Pacific negotiators at COP26. “The 1.5-degree target leaves Glasgow battered, bruised, but alive.”
Other states were angrily baffled by the subversion evident in the final text. Mexico’s envoy, Camila Isabel Zepeda Lizama, expressed anger at her country being “sidelined” in a “non-transparent and non-inclusive process”. “We all have remaining concerns but were told we could not reopen the text … while others can still ask to water down their promises.” A cabal of powers had done its trick.
For activists, there was no death knell to coal, as the UK Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, confidently claimed. “This is no longer a climate conference,” lamented climate change activist Greta Thunberg, the tenured voice of climate change catastrophism. “This is now a global greenwashing festival.” And with greenwashing shall come the vanishing, but not before a few more, gasbagging efforts.
I stumbled across the accompanying illustration years ago, while doing research on a racial incident in Texas. It obviously grabbed my attention.
The image was published in the Monday, July 26, 1937 edition of the Brownsville Herald. The caption above it read “Spain—One Year.” It referred to the Spanish Civil War.
This artistic expression would have been evocative even without a caption; but, generally speaking, I pay attention. I knew immediately how prophetic this editorial image had been.
The illustration was created to make a point about a tragedy that was playing out. The fascist, conservative-leaning Spanish military had risen up to rid the country of its liberal government, and the carnage was frenzied and ruthless. The coup sparked international outrage. Thousands of progressives from all over the world came to join or support the liberal freedom fighters, including Langston Hughes (black poet, activist and leader of the Harlem Renaissance), Paul Robeson (black athlete, singer, activist and stage and film actor), Ernest Hemingway (whom the struggle inspired to write For Whom the Bell Tolls), George Orwell (author of 1984), etc. All cultural heavyweights, no question. But the fascists were supported by Adolph Hitler, Benito Mussolini and Texaco.
If American President Franklin Delano Roosevelt had properly leashed Texaco [Parent company is Chevron — Ed]—who fueled the fascist military vehicles and planes (which were furnished by Germany and Italy) on credit, the good guys might have prevailed. And if the Roosevelt Administration had realized that the Spanish Civil War was a proving ground for German tanks and aircraft, and supplied the freedom fighters instead of allowing Texaco to bankroll the fascist transport and bombing enterprises, World War II might have been averted altogether—or at least reduced in scope and scale.
That’s why I saved this illustration.
It’s our waking nightmare.
Time is running out.
Our foe is not a mad dictator or foreign, rogue nation. Our enemies are complacency, apathy, ignorance and greed, and we seem powerless against them. We don’t even seem to be able to act in ways that assure or even improve the chances of our own long-term survival. We are afraid to rock the proverbial boat. We don’t want to get passed up for that next promotion or pay raise, or jeopardize our retirement plans. We cling wishfully to the notion that things can continue on as they always have. We want to have fun and indulge ourselves, and enjoy the fruits of our acquiescence. Perhaps, especially if the end is nigh.
But make no mistake. This illustration depicts our current future and the natural world’s only hope. It’s unpleasant to contemplate, but unequivocally criminal not to address.
We still have flesh on our bones. We have, at the very least, a disappearing window of opportunity, a hope, a slim chance. And if we acknowledge and accept the dangers of climate change, the growing catalog of environmental perils and the certainty of widespread ecosystem collapses, maybe we can finally act and survive, atone and replenish.
Oblivion doesn’t discriminate between Republican or Democrat. Extinction will not be reserved for Liberals or Conservatives. And neither side can solve these issues unilaterally.
Surely you and I can find common ground here.
It’s true, I’ve written fiery diatribes and practically entire books condemning American conservatives, but Republicans and Democrats are both failing us. And the empty skulls draining through the narrowed hourglass passage won’t just be emblazoned with swastikas or peace signs. We will all be represented. The timekeeper has been turned and our existences are piling up. Can you love thine enemy? Can we love our own neighbors? Do we still give a damn about our children’s and grandchildren’s futures? Will the meek inherit the earth or are they actually destroying it?
Can we find common ground in time? Can we join forces before the forces that threaten us all seal our fate?
Can we get our leaders to put a leash on the oil and gas industry? Can we come together and serve our mutually beneficial collective interests?
Fossil fuel apologists will cry foul here, but the industry’s record is clear. They’ve been aware that their products were bad for us and our environment for decades. And they’ve openly and unconscionably lobbied against efforts to clean up their act over the same period. In fact, they’re really no different than Texaco in the late 1930s, embracing fascism, profiting off death and ensuring injustice and widespread destruction.
Forward-thinking folks around the globe are once again joining the good guys, but America, again, is not. Our supposed land of the and the home of the brave is standing on the sidelines. But who are we kidding?
The United States is the most reprehensible fossil fuel profiteer on the planet and, to most of the rest of the world, America appears to be the mad dictator and rogue nation that sentient humanity must stop.
The Earth’s greenhouse-gas (GHG) concentrations are driving catastrophic climate change, and creating an existential threat to the planet. But there is a way out.
Last year, President Xi Jinping pledged that China’s carbon-dioxide emissions would peak before 2030, and that the country would become carbon-neutral before 2060.
China has a history of setting ambitious, nearly impossible goals and then achieving them –often before deadline – so this pledge is significant.
Under the Communist Party of China (CPC), Beijing has already created an “economic miracle” in transforming China into the largest economy in the world. It ended extreme poverty while creating the largest middle class in the world.
It has virtually eradicated Covid-19 through non-pharmaceutical methods, while vaccinating up to 20 million people daily, and pledging the largest number of vaccines (2.2 billion) and distributing more than a billion to the rest of the world.
It has also been applying similar focus and national resolve to tackle climate change.
China has the greatest program of adopting renewable energy of any country. It generates more renewable power than North, Central and South America – 42 countries – combined. It has more solar parks and wind farms than any other country. Last year it established more wind power than the rest of the world combined.
It has more electric vehicles than any other country: it operates 420,000 electric buses, 99% of the world’s total; Shenzhen alone has 16,000 e-buses and 22,000 e-taxis. It aims to have 325 million electric vehicles operating by 2050.
Its high-speed rail network spanning 38,000 kilometers is so extensive and effective that air travel is starting to become obsolete. No country has as dense, large, and efficient system of clean public transportation and high-speed rail as China.
In addition, China has the greatest carbon-sequestration afforestation program in the world, creating forests the size of Belgium every year. It has doubled its forest coverage to 23% over the past 40 years. Satellite analysis over the past 20 years by the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s Ames Research Lab proves that China has contributed more to greening the planet than any other country in the world.
In other words, by almost every sustainability index, China is a world leader – far ahead of the US, for example – and is pioneering a way forward for the planet. It will likely hit its targets ahead of time.
These things are happening because the CPC has written sustainability and ecological development directly into its constitution. This is then implemented into regional and local policy, such as sustainable eco-city mandates, transportation policy, energy infrastructure, and advanced research, as well as dedicated funding for alternative energy development for companies to start up and build clean energy technology.
These commitments exist despite the fact that China’s historical and per capita GHG and CO2 emissions are a fraction of the world’s total. According to the World Bank, on an annual per capita basis, China’s share is less than half of the United States; its household energy consumption is one-eighth of America’s.
Even more important, here’s a chart showing the cumulative emissions by country.
Cumulative historical amounts matter because CO2 does not dissipate but accrues in the atmosphere: stocks, not flows, are what matter. In accounting, you look at one’s total accrued debt, not one’s daily credit expenditures, to determine what he or she owes to others. Likewise, you have to look at historically accrued GHG to understand harms, liabilities, and mitigation responsibilities accurately.
Note also, between 14% and 33% of China’s annual GHG emissions are actually the West’s that have been offshored through manufacturing. This way, the West gets to have its cake and eat it too: consume, pollute and destroy the planet, while virtue-signaling and blaming developing countries like China for the cost of Western consumption.
China has a more sustainable approach along the entire chain of production and consumption. That said, China understands coal as a transitional source that it wants to phase out, except that the US has an explicit military plan to choke off China’s alternative fuel imports through the South China Sea.
China needs to maintain backup capacity in clean coal as it leapfrogs into renewables, which will constitute fully 80% of its energy portfolio by 2060. As for funding overseas coal plants, 87% of that finance comes from the West or Japan, and China has committed not to fund any more foreign coal plants.
With these commitments, China has demonstrated that it is dedicated and committed to both national and global sustainability and carbon neutrality.
Credit where it’s due
Last, most calculations of GHG emissions leave out the US military boot print, the single largest institutional emitter in the world, greater than the combined emissions of 140 nations. Add the cost of endless US wars, and subtract offshored GHG from the West from China’s total, you get a different picture of responsibility for global emissions.
Despite the hypocritical finger-pointing at China at COP26 by the worst polluters, the US and the West, the simple facts refute the lies.
China is a net GHG creditor nation, not a debtor. The Lancet showed that 92% of emissions above the safe level of 350 parts per million can be attributed to the Global North, of which 40% of these emissions are the United States’ alone. By contrast, China is a net creditor nation.
In other words, the atmosphere (atmospheric carrying capacity), a precious global commons, has been colonized and monopolized by the West to the detriment of the rest of the world. In this, the US bears the greatest individual responsibility for the global climate crisis.
Despite all this, China leads in solutions – in technology, policy, transition planning, and implementation. It is not only pulling its weight, it is showing the world a way forward.
This is in stark distinction to the US, where 25% of Congress members still refuse to believe in human-caused climate change and where the last president claimed that global warming was a “Chinese hoax.” The US was also responsible for disabling the original 1997 Kyoto Protocol by lowering standards, engineering carbon indulgences (“carbon trading”), exempting military emissions, and unjustly trying to offload responsibility to developing countries.
In the recent China-US Joint Glasgow Declaration on Enhancing Climate Action, the US momentarily dropped its China-bashing, and pledged to strengthen implementation of the Paris Agreement.
Is this about-face a sign of meaningful attempt to work together, or is it a temporary, opportunistic respite for domestic electoral reasons? Is the US capable of cooperating for the global good, or is this a momentary tactical reset within a general strategy of escalating hostility against China?
The constant demonization of China by the US leadership, not only on climate change, but on all fronts, reinforced through endless echo-chambering in the mainstream media, would suggest that this is not a good-faith change of heart.
For the sake of the planet, sanity must prevail to seek real win-win cooperation on all fronts to tackle the existential threat of our time. China is doing its part by demonstrating what an ecologically sustainable civilization based on common prosperity could look like.
Will the neoliberal West and the US follow suit, learn and cooperate, or will they play at politics and war, doubling down on the suicidal carbon-fueled endgame?
Clear-sighted citizens must challenge the lies, the mendacity, and the escalating demonization, and urge their governments to work for peace and cooperation.
Here we go, what will most likely be published in the Newport News Times, two-times a week dwindling newspaper. I will then follow up, for sure, at the end of this fit-for-small-town-news column.
November is National Native American Indian Heritage Month
By Paul K. Haeder
Humankind has not woven the web of life. We are but one thread within it. Whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves. All things are bound together. All things connect.
– Chief Seattle
It’s sad to gauge the ignorance Central Coast residents possess regarding Native American history and present day activities: education, culture, arts, language and political engagement.
The month of November is mostly the only time K12 students learn about Native Americans, and even then, it is most always in the past tense and lessons about Indians as helpless “wards of the state.”
Most of my students over four decades have had trouble with the concept that hundreds of books — especially textbooks — can lie. That first week of class, we research students’ family lines – those not native come from myriad of places. We then make up a passport of those countries they or their ancestors came from.
Accordingly, I steal them for a few weeks. Eventually, we see this theft as a process of stealing their own pasts, their histories, and their very identities.
I run into people DAILY in Lincoln County, who most vociferously display ignorance and outright racism when discussing Native Americans.
However, I’ve clashed with this ignorance in other parts of the USA: Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, Washington, and Oregon.
I’ve confronted college students’ parents who wanted to give my department heads a piece of their mind about the materials students in my research writing, composition and literature classes were asked to read, view and discuss.
I am embarrassed at the ignorance of who and what Columbus was and represents to many millions of people who are not Anglo Americans. Many college students do not know when the Civil War was fought (or why) or what James Madison or Frederick Douglass did.
Most do not know which Native lands their schools or neighborhoods are built upon. For sure, though, they enter the classroom with this myth of a brave fellow named Christopher Columbus “who discovered America” (sic).
Again, school textbooks have, by omission or otherwise, lied to them.
Today more than five hundred federally-recognized Indigenous nations comprise nearly three million people. Today’s doctors, lawyers, educators, nurses, construction workers and, yes, homeless, sick and substance abusers, are the descendants of the fifteen million Native people who once inhabited this land.
I’ve utilized interviews of, and essays by, historian Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz to enlighten students (and de facto, their parents/ the public) on a history of the United States told from the perspective of Indigenous peoples.
The original peoples did resist expansionism and genocide. In An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States, Dunbar-Ortiz takes readers into a deep dive debunking the official founding myth of the United States.
Part of the book and teachings give students a sense of how policy against Indigenous peoples was colonialist and designed to seize their territories, displacing or eliminating them.
This gives students who might be watching (or attending) COP26 (climate change summit in Glasgow) a sense of a worldwide effort by Indigenous activists to stop the pollution, water theft, elimination of ancestral lands through outright criminality.
Teaching about Native American history, I can challenge students to reflect upon their future, whereupon the youth understand they must act locally, learn deeply their own regions but also think and respond globally.
Global Witness’s, Last Line of Defense, looks into land defenders around the globe who have been murdered for fighting for their right to water, land and liberty. Teaching about Native American present day issues, we will broach these larger issues.
We don’t have to go far back to see how the fight in the US for Native American sovereignty is a constant reckoning with racist roots:
In August 2011, environmental and indigenous groups launched a massive campaign designed to press President Obama not to approve Phase IV of the Keystone XL Pipeline project that would run through and near tribal lands, water resources, and place of spiritual significance.
In 2013, the Havasupai Tribe Files a Lawsuit to Stop the Operation of a Uranium Mine.
On April 1st, 2016, citizens of the Standing Rock Lakota Nation and ally Lakota, Nakota, and Dakota citizens, under the group name “Chante tin’sa kinanzi Po” founded a Spirit Camp along the proposed route of the bakken oil pipeline, Dakota Access. They are dedicated to stopping the Dakota Access pipeline, illuminating the dangers associated with pipeline spills and the necessity to protect the water resources of the Missouri river.
The educators I have met in the Lincoln County School District who work with the youth of Confederated Tribes of the Siletz Indians on the history, culture and current struggles of the Central Coast original people are amazing and should be regarded as cultural heroes.
What Local Residents Really Can’t Take
The amount of racism I experienced teaching/subbing just a year in this Coastal County is not so unusual, but still disheartening. This concept of “we beat them, so they have to eat our crow” is how the lowly, the poor speak, and the more educated, well, they have seven syllable words and books 22 people read that say the same things, but in a thousand pages.
Hick, small-town, and backwards? Nah, the great liberal city of Portland now is going after BIPOC.
Yeah, this is a story, November 3, 2021, the blue state, the build back better retrograde land:
An analysis by a Portland city watchdog found that complaints about property maintenance have been highly concentrated in the city’s most diverse and rapidly gentrifying neighborhoods.
The report from the city ombudsman’s office made public Wednesday showed that neighborhoods with some of the fastest-rising home prices, and those with the most racially diverse residents, tend to also face the most financial consequences for property violations like overgrown grass, trash in a yard or a deteriorating building.
But back to the Native American Indian Heritage Month. I have countless fights with co-workers, members of the public, students, and more. Countless. As if I am the first asshole in their lives to put up a resistance to their racism. It is a deep racism. All the way to the core, and while I don’t pull my revolutionary anti-USA, anti-Military, anti-Anything-to-do-with-capitalism rank on them immediately, I do not stand for insipid ignorance that pushes racism as a way to delineate the victors and the losers. Again poor white trash, or rich white trash, complaining about China, about billionaires, about misrepresentative government for, by, because of the rich, the lobbyists, on both sides of the red-blue manure pile. Yet, they do not see themselves now as the losers in this billionaire’s game. Nope. Every social safety net, every infrastructure net, every security net, frayed, cut, burned, and they still believe that the Indians, or the Africans, or whomever, if they are under the thumb of this or that white great savior, so be it. But, again, these whites losing everything, including their Oxi lives, their coronary arterial clogged lives, but they do not see that as “well, we are the losers in this rich man’s/oligarchy system, so shut up and take the comeuppance delivered . . . just like we think the conquered tribes should too.”
Old Teddy — Swing a Big Racist Stick, Roosevelt, oh, that family!
When Theodore Roosevelt took office in 1901, he already had a long legacy of animosity toward American Indians.
Seventeen years earlier, Roosevelt, then a young widower, left New York in favor of the Dakotas, where he built a ranch, rode horses and wrote about life on the frontier. When he returned to the east, he famously asserted that “the most vicious cowboy has more moral principle than the average Indian.”
“I don’t go so far as to think that the only good Indians are the dead Indians, but I believe nine out of every 10 are,” Roosevelt said during a January 1886 speech in New York. “And I shouldn’t like to inquire too closely into the case of the tenth.” (source)
And, so, what does this racist’s offspring have to say? You got it, once a racist from their loins, always a millionaire racist with loins to breed more and more racists:
“He was a man of his times,” said Tweed Roosevelt, a great-grandson to Roosevelt and interim director of the Theodore Roosevelt Association. “In his presidency, he wanted the Native Americans to experience the American dream, but to do that by assimilating. The Indian population had been shrinking for a long time, and he believed that if they assimilated, that meant prosperity for everyone.” (source)
And Build Back Better Biden, oh, man, 2021, and his level of enlightenment, whew:
There’s no federal environmental impact statement on this project, which is why we want Joe Biden to stop it. I mean, they stole 5 billion gallons of water, fracked 28 rivers out, and then they have this broken aquifer losing 100,000 gallons a day of water. They have no idea how to fix this stuff, since January. You know, it’s really horrible up here. So, you know, Enbridge has been trying to rush to get this online before the court will rule against them, because, generally, courts have not ruled in favor of pipelines. That’s the status that we have seen, you know, in the federal court ruling on the DAPL, where the federal court ordered them to close down. This is the same company. Enbridge was 28% of DAPL. And when the federal court ordered them to close down the pipe, they said no. When the state of Michigan ordered them to close down a pipe this last May, they said no. So they’re just trying to continue their egregious behavior.
It’s so tragic that, you know, on one hand, the Biden administration is like, “We are going to have Indigenous Peoples’ Day, but we’re still going to smash you in northern Minnesota and smash the rest of the country.” Same thing, you know, Klobuchar and Smith, the two Minnesota senators, shameful their lack of courage, not only for Indigenous people but for the planet, you know?
When I left there to go to the second gathering of another couple thousand people closing down the line at the headwaters of the Mississippi, shortly after that is when they came in with the helicopter and kicked up this sandstorm so everybody could get all beat up by sand. And I just want to put out: That’s a federal agency; that’s not a state agency that came in. Most of the cops have been just financed by Enbridge, but that helicopter was financed by Biden. So, we have some really — we’re really concerned that Department of Homeland Security would come in and basically assault Indigenous people in our own homeland.
— Winona LaDuke
And this is what a strong advocate for Native American truth gets in the USA: You will have to read between the crap lines of Mother Jones, if you want the entire story — Churchill is 73 now, “I Never Claimed I Was F***ing Sitting Bull“:
Standing before the crowd, the 69-year-old Churchill cut the image of the bomb-throwing radical—“a traitor,” as O’Reilly put it—that he’d been cultivating his entire life: 6-foot-5 in cowboy boots, with a long gray-black ponytail cinched with a black band and his waist lassoed with a beaded belt. He grit his teeth while talking, like he was chewing tobacco, and spat out his words with disgust. “American jockstrap sniffers,” he called his critics, in particular the academics who’d picked apart his scholarship and helped get him fired. He compared them to SS officers, to apparatchiks helping the trains of a supposedly corrupt University of Colorado system run on time. “That’s what Eichmann did,” he said. The crowd gasped with delight.
Churchill’s penchant for this comparison, ad-Nazium, runs deep. Each of his 18 books is a brick in a monumental project dedicated to proving that Native Americans were subjected to a genocide comparable to the Holocaust. The day after September 11, he published an essay describing the stockbrokers and technocrats who died in the Twin Towers as “little Eichmanns.” Right-wing media was incensed:The O’ReillyFactor aired 41 segments on him. The Weekly Standard tagged him “the worst professor in America.”
Back on the highway, Churchill stomped on the pedal and gunned it to 80 mph. He lit his last Pall Mall. “I’m only human,” he said, as the city he no longer recognized gave way to farmland and snowy peaks. He went even faster—85, 90.
It was as though he were trying to outrun Boulder, but without a clear destination in mind. The seatbelt warning screamed. “It hurts,” he said. “I’ve been hurt. No one said the fucking process of decolonization was going to be painless.”
[Ward Churchill in 2006, before he was fired from the University of Colorado. Thomas Boyd/Zuma]
So, any National Indigenous People’s month should be National Indigenous People’s Year, full of reparations, full of the white man’s own burdens cast away on some Gates or Soros or Trump Island.
And of course, it is Heineken, brothers and sisters. Of course, AMLO, el presidente de Mejico, is not socialist. Wine, soda pop, booze, beer.
In front of the cameras of a national newspaper, he showed the arid land where there used to be fruit trees:
“All of this disappeared due to lack of water; because we don’t have enough water. We do not have a permit to extract water with a well, and we would like Blanca Jimenez, the head of CONAGUA, to consider us before the large water consuming companies. Heineken has more than 12 wells, and the aquifer is overexploited.”
The Kumiai people don’t have water to plant. Óscar recently participated in an assembly and in organizational meetings for the self-determination of the Kumiai people; to defend the water against the constant assault of the corporations. He was always on the lookout to prevent wineries, foreigners or avaricious locals, (he called them “vivillos”), from taking land away from the community. (source)
This has been going on throughout Mexico’s history with those drug-dealing and neoliberal and thieving last six presidents — 36 years since they serve 6 year terms. Since 2017, Mexicali resistance groups have been defending the capital of Baja California’s water supply against foreign investment brewery Constellation Brands. Booze all with these double dealings and contracts with the state government of Baja California and its governor Francisco “Kiko” Vega.
Of course, Constellation Brands is a Fortune 500 company, an international producer and marketer of beer, wine and spirits with recognizable imported brands such as Corona Extra, Corona Light, Modelo Especial, Modelo Negra, Pacifico and Ballast Point.
Ahh, not just booze — Coca-Cola, FedEx, Walmart, Samsung and Hyundai are among the more than 400 companies stealing water and polluting rivers and water systems.
Man, is this coming close to home — since 1981 when I was a reporter in El Paso, the entire black lagoons and multiple strange diseases from pollutants coming from the transnational twin plants (maquiladoras) got many of us militarized against these pigs of profits. Babies born with part of their brains outside their skulls. Flesh eating parasites. More and more cancers. This is the gift that keeps on giving in capitalism, and that was 40 years ago.
And it is, of course, worse: “That corruption contributed to chronic under-funding of the state water agency, known as the Comisión Estatal de Servicios Públicos de Tijuana or CESPT, Bonilla said. To cover up the water theft, the auditor says, some companies also installed their own clandestine drainage systems to illegally discharge contaminated water into Tijuana’s already strained storm drains and canal.”
Here’s a student at Cal State Fullerton:
In a 2016 letter to Coahuila state Governor Rubén Moreira, former Mayor Leoncio Martínez Sánchez of the municipality of Zaragoza wrote, “We have no water for human consumption.”
The ache I feel from that single sentence grows in addition to anticipating the worst to come once the brewery completes its Mexicali plant. There is not one community in that city I don’t worry about. Constellation Brands damaged Zaragoza, so who’s to say it won’t hurt my home as well?
I have yet to see people move away from beers like Modelo, mainly my peers at Cal State Fullerton. — “Column: Modelo’s time is up after shady business” by Rebecca Mena
So yes, this is National Indigenous People’s Year, Decade, Century. As always, it’s about the beer, the coffee, the sugar, the needless shit of tourism and the rich and the disposable income fucks:
In October 2019, the Mexican Association of Beer Makers (ACERMEX), an organization similar to the United States’ Brewers Association, estimated the country would surpass 1,000 craft beer companies by the start of 2020, many of whom are based in the state of Baja California. But this persistent rise of beer businesses has been fraught with roadblocks, forcing scrappy entrepreneurs to fight tooth and nail to operate openly.
These obstacles range from a near-complete stranglehold of the market by Anheuser-Busch InBev–owned Grupo Modelo and Heineken-owned Cuauhtémoc Moctezuma to prohibitively expensive import taxes on ingredients. When asked what’s stifling Baja breweries’ growth, Collin Corrigan, a San Diego native and founder of Ensenada’s Cervecería Transpeninsular, just laughs. “Do you have a couple days to listen? I could go on for hours.”
So that Dutch company is still the colonizer, and those indigenous heroes are murdered so the 12 wells that this amazing man was protesting can continue to pump while thousands of people can’t grow bean, squash, tomatoes, and more. Ownership of Heineken Holding N.V is listed on the NYSE Euronext Amsterdam. Its single investment is Heineken International. It is majority owned by L’Arche Green N.V an investment vehicle of the Heineken family and the Hoyer family. All in the family, in MEXICO, Baja!
Native Americas Month, no? Turtle Island. All of the Americas.
[Óscar Eyraud Adams: A Warrior Who Defended the Water of the Kumiai People]
And then, the white guy (Louis Wilson, Global Witness senior adviser) with the British accent tells us today on Amy “Soros” Goodman this —
Absolutely. So, the stories that we hear — and they’re each, in each instance, a tragedy, but as you look at the global picture, you see a common thread: The threats against environmental activists are caused by the same forces that are driving the climate crisis. So, the same force that is pulling minerals out of the ground, that is felling trees, that is polluting our air, is also causing violence and threats against activists.
So, the case you’ve just referenced in Mexico was just a month prior to Fikile’s death. An activist called Óscar Eyraud in Tecate, in northern Mexico, had been protesting for years water access. His community, an Indigenous community there, had been denied access to traditional water resources, at the same time as a big corporation, Heineken, was granted additional access by the local government. Óscar was murdered on September 22nd. And nobody, I think, would suggest that Heineken directly organized that killing, but it’s clear that they created the conditions that made that murder possible. And it’s very difficult to see that murder, or indeed many of the other 227 murders, taking place without that resource extraction by big companies.
And this is the stuff of Americans, of the consumers, the consummate consumers and thieves of cultures, both indigenous and those in conquered lands of their own doing. “Baja Beer Is Crushing It — The craft beer scene in Baja is emerging from San Diego’s shadow and coming into its own” by Beth Demmon February 10, 2020 — San Diego Magazine
This is the heartlessness of the American and Canadian and European and Australian and elites in all the other capitalist strongholds scene. Cancel Culture, for sure — no more people of the land, no more farmers of the land, no more cultures of the land, no more unique tribes and communities of the land, no more languages and arts of those people. It is all Edward Bernays, Madison Avenue and the other bourgeois sickness that is the “scene.”
And this, of course: “Every Monday night in the small community of Shiprock, New Mexico, a group of young Navajo leaders meet to decide how they will help their community. For more than seven years, the Northern Diné Youth Committee has worked to give youth opportunities to directly make changes within their community. But while the NDYC works to make changes, many members also consider their own futures, commitments to family and the world outside of the Shiprock. While they love their community, they all must consider their options both on and off the reservation.”
So there you have it — Heineken, oh, the innocence of this Dutch Company and the Family, man, the Family.
And relevant for COP26, the green porn, man, killing native communities, one activist after another. The horror, man, the horror of it all.
“Heineken Mexico has been present in Baja California for 76 years, and represents employment for 2,200 citizens, which are added to 100 employees, who operate in a brewery, in nine distribution centers and in continuous improvement,” said Escobedo.
On the other hand, Oscar Galvez, General Director of Corporate Affairs of Heineken Mexico, stated that the company’s commitment is based on the sustainable development of the country and Baja California. Proof of this is that since 2015 the company began the transition from a linear economy to a circular economy and implemented ecological chillers in which 98% of its components are recycled or reused and achieved a significant reduction in CO2 emissions.
It is worth noting that Baja California ranks fourth in beer production in Mexico and third in job generation.
It was not for everybody, but the shock advertising tactics of the Australian comedian Dan Ilic made an appropriate point. Australia’s Prime Minister Scott Morrison, a famed coal hugger, has vacillated about whether to even go to the climate conference in Glasgow. Having himself turned the country’s prime ministerial office into an extended advertising agency, Ilic was speaking his language.
The language was promoted through sponsored imagery in Times Square, New York, with advertising space purchased by a crowdfunding campaign of considerable success. Billboards featured the prime minister as a “Coal-o-phile Dundee”, mercilessly mocked Australia’s climate policies and responses to the murderously scorching bushfires of 2020.
It had begun modestly: a target of $12,500 to fund a few billboards in Glasgow during COP26 as part of the project JokeKeeper: Shaming Australia’s climate inaction, described as, “Subversive comedy to ridicule fossil fuel supporting parties in the upcoming federal election.”
But the contributions gushed in, passing $160,000. It was then that Ilic began to think even more boldly. On October 14, he announced that JokeKeeper was rolling “into New York City on the way to COP26 in Glasgow”. New Yorkers were advised to head down to Times Square “to see our billboard wrapping the Marriot Marquis for a full 10 minutes.” It also included a 3min20s loop viewable 3 times. “So you can keep track of it all we’ve made you a handy Bingo Card.” In simple terms, Ilic had secured a 10-minute slot on the 77-foot “Godzilla” billboard. The headline parody: “Visit Australia, we’re rich in wind, sunshine and climate denial”. For good measure, it features a kangaroo ablaze and koalas perched in a tree. Hug them before they vanish.
On CNN, Ilic was also ablaze. “We have a PM who at the height of the bushfires took a holiday in Hawaii.” Morrison was the sort of fellow who “always runs away from a national crisis. We have to lead our leaders.”
Morrison is certainly one to run away from a certain target towards the sunset of vague aspiration. His mantra of “technology not taxes” is one such example. While few would disagree that technology will play a vital role in reducing carbon emissions, stimulating its development can come from, as Michael Keating puts it, implementing “policies to first encourage this innovation and then the take-up of the resulting new technologies.”
To aid what is essentially a non-policy, Morrison has his truculent junior Coalition partners. The Nationals portray themselves as the party of opposition, despite being part of the government. Former political advisor John Menadue sums up the somewhat perverse situation by remarking that a party which draws in only 5 percent of the national vote “is holding Australia to ransom on climate change.”
In a truly absurd spectacle, National Party politicians pontificate in favour of the fossil fuel industry, seeking a socialist-styled underwriting of its workings and policies that would chastise banks for not funding policies that rent the earth. Their traditional base – the farming constituency – risks suffering the most from this suicidal adventurism.
Certain figures in the mining industry can only delight in such committed subservience. Gina Rinehart, Australia’s wealthiest individual, has become the lumpy Boadicea of climate change denial, funding think-thanking endeavours that seek to deny anthropogenic change while keeping her influence strong with the Deputy Prime Minister, Barnaby Joyce, former resources minister Matt Canavan and the current Attorney-General Michaelia Cash.
As owner of Hancock Prospecting, her interests in coal are global and unsparing, featuring such projects as an expansion into North America. Her ventures into Canada’s Rocky Mountains have so far been frustrated by the governments of Alberta and the federal government but that has not stopped her from taking them to court. She was undeterred by the 679-page report by the Joint Review Panel led by the Alberta Energy Regulator and the federal Impact Assessment Agency on her proposed Grassy Mountain project. The authors had taken a dim view of potential effects of selenium pollution, threats to water quality in the Oldman River basin and dangers posed to the cutthroat trout. The Australian, however, remains a devotee of both fossil fuel exploitation and litigation.
Earlier this month, Rinehart revealed to students attending her old Perth school St. Hilda’s Anglican School for Girls, how the recipient of a wealthy mining fortune can diminish science and embrace a stubborn parallel reality. In her 16-minute long video showing a modest command of language and much footage of herself at school, she wishes to set the record straight on the lunacy of climate change, though the ABC tells us that only portions of the production were shown to those tender school minds. “Rationale should ask, why does the media in general and those they influence now call for reducing carbon? More questions spring to mind. Please be very careful about information spread on an emotional basis, or tied to money, or egos or power seekers.” A marked, if unintendedly accurate self-portrait, a warning for all those around her, if ever there was one.
Rinehart continues her lesson, reflecting on an education free of propaganda (because Australian school curricula were obviously free of that) and full of analytical thrust. “It concerns me greatly, that the current generation of school leavers and attendees, too often miss such important basics. As too often propaganda erodes these critical foundations.” Rinehart, it should be remembered, has a psychological profile befitting many a dysfunctional Roman emperor, with demanding and suspicious children to boot.
With such characters in the fossil fuel consortium, Ilic has his dark comedic scripts written for him. The billboard effort in Times Square has as its target something the German Lutheran Pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer called cheap grace: the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance. And cheap grace is precisely the sort of thing the Australian delegation at Glasgow will be offering in spades and tailings.
Today is Indigenous Peoples Day. Across the country, a growing number of cities and states are recognizing this day in place of the traditional Columbus Day. This change reflects the growing awareness that holidays like Columbus Day are used to rewrite the past and uphold institutions of white supremacy, racism and settler colonialism. As Justin Teba writes, in Albuquerque, they issued a proclamation to recognize this as a day “ to reflect upon the ongoing struggles of Indigenous peoples on this land.”
I can only write from the perspective of a settler, but I do want to highlight a few of the current struggles. We have a responsibility to educate ourselves about the history of the founding of the United States, to join in struggle with those who are oppressed and to transform our society to end these devastating institutions.
Increased attention to the finding of children’s graves at residential boarding schools has brought the reality of the American Genocide to the forefront. Residential boarding schools for indigenous children started in Carlisle, Pennsylvania as a way to erase indigenous knowledge and culture. These were brutal places where children were killed through violence and neglect. The last schools closed in the 1990’s so there are still survivors who are speaking out about their experiences.
On September 30, Canadians recognized the first National Day for Truth and Reconciliation. Canada established a Truth and Reconciliation Commission following a class action lawsuit settlement that held hearings to gather testimony from 2008 to 2014 about the residential schools. They heard from 6,500 people. Establishing the national day to raise awareness was one of the recommendations, but there is still a long way to go to repair the relationships between indigenous peoples and settlers.
The Tulalip tribe in Everett, Washington also participated in the national day on September 30 with a vigil and speak out. They called it Residential Boarding School Awareness Day or Orange Shirt Day because one survivor Phyllis Webstad’s favorite orange shirt was taken from her on the first day of school. It wasn’t until 1978, through the Indian Child Welfare Act, that indigenous parents gained the right to keep their children out of those schools. Now that act is under threat of being overturned by the US Supreme Court and big oil is behind that attack.
That big oil would go after indigenous children is a response to the effectiveness of indigenous leadership in the fight to protect the planet. A recent report led by the Indigenous Environmental Network found that just in the past ten years, indigenous resistance to fossil fuel projects “stopped or delayed greenhouse gas pollution equivalent to at least one-quarter of annual U.S. and Canadian emissions.”
Texas lobbyists are behind the effort to end the Indian Child Welfare Act too. Perhaps this is also a response to indigenous organizing. For example, the Karankawa People, who once controlled 300 miles of the Texas coastline and were thought to be extinct, have made a comeback and are fighting the oil company, Moda Midstream, that owns their land and is trying to expand its export facility there.
Another current indigenous-led struggle against fossil fuel infrastructure is the fight to stop Enbridge’s Line 3 pipeline in Minnesota. Activists have taken direct action all year to stop construction. There have been nearly 900 people arrested. Despite their efforts, it looks like Canadian tar sands will soon be flowing through that pipeline, but activists are not giving up, just as the fight to stop the Dakota Access pipeline continues. Just last week, Water Protectors confronted Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison at a public event.
This week, they are in Washington, DC with the Build Back Fossil Free campaign to demand that President Biden take actions consistent with his words. They are holding actions each day to force President Biden to choose a side, the people and planet or the fossil fuel industries. The Biden administration recently opened up 78 million acres in the Gulf of Mexico for oil drilling saying that the Code Red report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was not “sufficient cause” to halt the drilling. Environmental groups are uniting to sue the administration over this. The Biden administration could also halt the expansion of oil exports from Texas, but it is not doing that. I spoke with activist Diane Wilson on Clearing the FOG during her hunger strike against the export expansion.
The Indigenous Environmental Network is also highly critical of the Biden infrastructure plan. They write:
Specifically, we demanded Congress oppose false ‘clean energy’ solutions in the Clean Electricity Performance Program (CEPP), include set-asides for frontline communities, and include both Justice40 and climate standards in the Build Back Better Act. Unfortunately, these important requests and demands were undermined through a political process intentionally designed to silence the voices of impacted communities while maintaining the status quo.
Indigenous voices and leadership are also being excluded from the upcoming COP 26 meetings this November in Glasgow, Scotland. As the extreme events of this year demonstrate, we have no time to lose to act on the climate crisis. Those who are most impacted and who have the knowledge and skills to protect the planet must be at the forefront of the talks and decision-making process. Efforts are underway to create a People’s Climate Conference to make recommendations to the COP26 meetings.
Another indigenous-led effort is the global campaign to force banks to stop investing in new and current fossil fuel infrastructure. They are also focused on the COP26 meetings with their global call to action. Many people are calling for the creation of a Fossil Fuel Nonproliferation Treaty by the United Nations. While the UN did not take action on that during the recent general assembly, the Human Rights Council did recently pass a resolution declaring that access to a healthy environment is a human right.
Going after the fossil fuel industry is a great risk. Activists have faced violent repression, murder, incarceration and retaliation. Activists are labeled as eco-terrorists, a designation that should be used for those who are destroying the planet, not for those who are trying to save it. This past week, human rights lawyer Steven Donziger, who represented an indigenous community in Ecuador that won a $9.5 billion dollar settlement against the Chevron oil company, was sentenced to six months in jail after more than two years on house arrest. The United Nations Human Rights Commissioner declared that the treatment of Donziger violates international law and ordered the United States to free him, but the judge didn’t listen. That case is rife with court abuse.
Not going after the fossil fuel industries carries an even greater risk – mass extinctions, environmental devastation, extreme weather events and an uninhabitable future. Around the world, people are fighting to address these crises. Indigenous peoples, who are currently protecting 80% of the planet’s biodiversity, are fundamental as leaders in this struggle. This Indigenous Peoples Day, let’s recognize that we must end the attacks on indigenous peoples, support their work and create a new world that puts people and the planet over profit.
Nicaragua is one country that is demonstrating this is possible. Through its investment in efforts to create food sovereignty using agroecological methods, clean energy and returning land to indigenous ownership, Nicaragua demonstrates what a livable future can look like. It is up to us to do the same everywhere.
Battles in the US Congress that erupted again this week, holding up an extra $1bn in military funding for Israel, underscored just how divorced from reality the conversation about US financial aid to Israel has become, even among many critics.
For 48 hours last month, a small group of progressive Democrats in the US House of Representatives succeeded in sabotaging a measure to pick up the bill for Israel to replenish its Iron Dome interception missiles. The Iron Dome system was developed by Israel, with generous financial backing from successive US administrations, in the wake of the 2006 war against Hezbollah in Lebanon. Today, it ostensibly serves to protect Israel from short-range, largely improvised rockets fired intermittently out of Gaza.
Supplies of the Iron Dome missiles, each of which cost at least $50,000, were depleted back in May, when Israel triggered widespread confrontations with Palestinians by intensifying its settlement of Palestinian neighbourhoods near Jerusalem’s Old City and violently raiding al-Aqsa Mosque. Palestinian militant groups fired large numbers of rockets out of Gaza, which has been blockaded by Israel for the past 15 years. Iron Dome intercepted the rockets before they could land in Israel.
The group of progressive Democrats, known popularly as the Squad, scotched an initial move by their congressional leadership to include the $1bn assistance to Israel in US budget legislation. But the money for Iron Dome was quickly reintroduced as a stand-alone bill that passed overwhelmingly, with 420 votes in favour and nine against. Two representatives, one of them the prominent Squad member Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, voted “present” – counting effectively as an abstention.
This week, the furore moved to the Senate when Rand Paul, a strong Republican critic of US foreign aid, refused to nod through the bill and thereby give it unanimous assent. It will now need to go through a more complicated legislative process.
The latest funding for Iron Dome comes in addition to the $3.8bn Israel receives annually from the US in military aid, which has made Israel the biggest recipient, by far, of such largesse. Putting the new tranche of Iron Dome aid into perspective, it is twice what Washington contributes annually to Nato’s budget.
The previous administration, under former President Donald Trump, turned US funding for Nato into a big domestic controversy, arguing that the US was shouldering too much of the burden. But there has been barely a peep about the massive military bill the US is footing for Iron Dome.
Debate stifled
The Squad’s main achievement in launching its brief blocking move was to force out into the open the fact that the US is paying for Israel’s stockpile of missiles. Like the House leadership, the Israel lobby had hoped the money could be transferred quietly, without attracting attention.
What little debate did ensue related to whether Israel really needs US military assistance. A few commentators asked why Washington was kitting out one of the richer countries on the planet with missiles in the midst of a pandemic that has hit the US economy hard.
But the lobby quickly stifled a far more important debate about whether the US should be encouraging Israel’s use of Iron Dome at all. Instead, US funding for the interception missile system was presented as being motivated solely by a desire to save lives.
In attacking Paul’s decision to block the bill, the biggest pro-Israel lobby group in Congress, AIPAC, argued this week that his move would “cost innocent lives, make war more likely, and embolden Iran-backed terrorists”.
It was precisely the claim that the Iron Dome is defensive that appeared to push Ocasio-Cortez, usually seen as one of the few US politicians openly critical of Israel, into a corner, leading to her abstention.
Images from the House floor showed her tearful and being given a hug by another representative after the vote. She later attributed her distress in part to how Iron Dome funding had a polarising effect at home, noting that the House bill was a “reckless” move to “rip our communities apart”.
That was an apparent reference to factional tensions within the Democratic Party between, on one side, many Jewish voters who back what they see as Israel’s right to defend itself and, on the other, many Black and Hispanic voters who think it is wrong for the US to financially support Israel’s oppression of Palestinians.
Some saw her indecision as evidence of her ambitions to run for the Senate, where positions critical of Israel would be more likely to damage her prospects of success.
Expiring in silence
In Israel, and in Jewish communities beyond, the conversation about US support for Iron Dome is even more detached from reality. The nine US representatives who voted against were roundly castigated for willing the deaths of Israelis by voting to deny them protection from rockets fired from Gaza. In predictable fashion, Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations, Gilad Erdan, called those who voted against “either ignorant or antisemitic”.
But some liberals took the argument in a different, even more fanciful direction. They called the Squad “hypocrites” for voting against the $1bn funding, arguing that Iron Dome missiles not only save Israelis, but Palestinians too. One Haaretz commentator went so far as to claim that Palestinians were actually the main beneficiaries of the Iron Dome system, arguing: “The fact Israel has a defensive shield against rocket attacks makes a wide-scale military operation with thousands of – mainly Palestinian – casualties less likely.”
Of course, there is the small question of whether Israel has indeed been “forced” into its attacks on Gaza. It is precisely its military superiority – paid for by the US – that has freed it to carry out those massive attacks, in which large numbers of Palestinians, including hundreds of children, are killed, rather than negotiate an end to its decades-long occupation.
Just as in life, bullies resort to intimidation and violence because they feel no need to compromise. But even more to the point, Iron Dome is central to Israel’s efforts to keep Palestinians imprisoned in Gaza, entirely subjugated and stripped of any power to resist.
With Israel patrolling tiny Gaza’s land borders and coast, sealing off the enclave from the rest of the world, Palestinians have few options to protest their slow starvation – or to gain attention for their plight. Israeli snipers have fired on Palestinians staging unarmed, mass protests at the fence caging them in, killing and wounding thousands. The Israeli navy fires on or sinks Palestinian boats, including fishing boats, in Gaza’s waters if they stray more than a few kilometres from the shore.
Iron Dome, far from being defensive, is another weapon in Israel’s armoury to keep Palestinians subdued, impoverished, corralled and silent. For those claiming to want peace in Israel-Palestine, the extra funding for Iron Dome just made that prospect even less likely. As long as Palestinians can be made to slowly expire in silence – their plight ignored by the rest of the world – Israel is free to seize and colonise yet more of what was supposed to become a future Palestinian state.
Systems of domination
But there is another reason why Ocasio-Cortez should have voted against the Iron Dome resupply, rather than tearfully abstaining – and that is for all our sakes, not just the sake of Palestinians.
The US foots the bill for Iron Dome, just as it does for most of Israel’s other weapons development, for self-interested reasons: because it helps its own war industries, as Washington seeks to maintain its military dominance globally.
With western populations less willing to sacrifice their sons and daughters for the sake of modern wars, which seem less obviously related to defence and more transparently about the control of key resources, the Pentagon has worked overtime to reframe the public debate.
It is hard to disguise its global domination industries as anything but offensive in nature. This is where Israel has played a critical role. Not only has Israel helped to develop weapons systems like Iron Dome, but – despite being a nuclear-armed, belligerent, occupying state – it has leveraged its image as a vulnerable refuge for the long-persecuted Jewish people. It has been able to make more plausible the case that these domination systems really are defensive.
In recent decades, Israel has developed and tested drone technology to surveil and assassinate Palestinians, which has proved invaluable in the US and UK’s long-term occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq. Israel’s latest “swarm” technology – making drones even more lethal – may prove particularly attractive to the Pentagon.
Israel has also been the ideal partner for the Pentagon in testing and refining the battlefield use of the new generation of F-35 fighter planes, the most expensivemilitary product in US history. Uniquely, Israel has been allowed to customise the jet, adapting its capabilities in new, unforeseen ways.
Bowing to US hegemony
The F-35’s ultimate role is to make sure major rival airforces, such as Russia’s and China’s, are elbowed out of the skies. And Israel has been at the forefront of developing and testing a variety of missile interception systems, such as Iron Dome, David’s Sling, and Arrow, which are intended to destroy incoming projectiles, from short-range rockets to long-range missiles.
Last December, Israel announced it had successfully launched Iron Dome interception missiles for the first time from the sea. Reports noted that the US arms maker Raytheon and the US defence department were involved in the tests. That is because, behind the scenes, the US is not only paying for the development and testing of these systems; it is also guiding the uses to which they will be put. The Pentagon has bought two Iron Dome batteries, which, according to Israeli media, have been stationed in US military bases in the Gulf.
The US has its own interception systems under development, and it is unclear which it will come to rely on most heavily. But what is evident is that Washington, Israel and their Gulf allies have Iran in their immediate sights. Any country that refuses to bow to US global hegemony could also be targeted.
US interest in these missiles is not defensive. They are fundamental to its ability to neutralise the responses of rivals to either a US military attack, or more general moves by the US to dominate territory and control resources.
Just as Palestinians have been besieged by Israel for 15 years, the US and Gulf states may hope one day to deal a knockout blow to Iran’s oil exports. Washington would be able to ignore current concerns that Tehran could retaliate by firing on shipping through the Strait of Hormuz or on hostile Middle Eastern capitals. If Iran’s missiles can be intercepted, it will be incapable of defending itself against increasing economic or military aggression from the US or its neighbours.
Less safe world
Following the US withdrawal from Afghanistan this summer, there has been plenty of naive talk that the US is seeking a diminished role in the world. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Ultimately, the US is seeking global dominance at arm’s length – through a combination of long-range military power, cyber warfare, robotics and artificial intelligence – that it hopes will lift the restraints imposed by American casualties and domestic opposition.
Israel’s playbook with regards to Palestinians is one that elites in Washington trust can be exported to other corners of the globe, and even outer space. Interception missiles lie at the heart of that strategic vision, as a way to neutralise and silence all resistance. This is why no one who cares about a less violent, exploitative and dangerous world should be indifferent to, or neutral on, congressional funding for Iron Dome.
Missile interception systems are the face not of a more defensive, safer world, but of a far more nakedly hostile, aggressive one.
The access road to Coastal GasLink’s drill site at the Wedzin Kwa river was destroyed. Blockades have been set up and sites have been occupied to stop the drilling under the sacred headwaters that nourish the Wet’suwet’en Yintah and all those within its catchment area. Cas Yikh and supporters have gained control of the area and refuse to allow this destruction to continue.
Days ago CGL destroyed our ancient village site, Ts’elkay Kwe. When Gidimt’en Checkpoint spokesperson Sleydo’ attempted to monitor the CGL archaeological team and contest the destruction of Wet’suwet’en cultural heritage she was aggressively intimdated by CGL security guards. Tensions have continued to rise on the Yintah as CGL pushes a reckless and destructive construction schedule with the support of private security and the RCMP.
Now, CGL is ready to begin drilling beneath our sacred headwaters, Wedzin Kwa. We know that this would be disastrous, not only for Wet’suwet’en people, but for all living beings supported by the Wedzin Kwa, and for the communities living downstream. Wedzin Kwa is a spawning ground for salmon and a critical source of pristine drinking water.
“our way of life is at risk. Wedzin Kwa is the river that feeds all of Wet’suwet’en territory and gives life to our nation.” -Sleydo’, Gidimte’en Checkpoint Spokesperson
As Coastal Gaslink Continues to trespass, we will do everyting in our power to protect our waters and to uphold our laws. Gidimt’en Checkpoint has issued a call for support, asking people to travel to Cas Yikh Territory to Stand with them.”
“Sleydo’ and Shay speak about the importance of defending Wedzin Kwa. Every day is a fight when you commit to living an Indigenous way of life. They have been trying to kill us since contact. What they haven’t learned yet and what Sleydo’ articulates so perfectly is:
“Our warrior spirits are stronger than they’ll ever be”
Our ancestors fought for our yintah, we have stories of great wars, and we will continue their work.
Today there was another arrest, after release the person was sent to get medical attention in an ambulance. There are no broken bones thankfully and the person is resting comfortably tonight.
We anticipate more RCMP tomorrow. We ask anyone thinking of coming out to support locally please come early in the day, we will have coffee on and a place for you to gather. Check in at 44 km. Covid protocols in place, please bring a mask and a mug.
China deals with housing crisis caused by the real-estate developers, particularly, Evergrande. China punishes mining companies for criminal practices in the Democratic Republic of Congo and orders them back home. China also remembers the Mukden Incident, a Japanese pretext to invade and occupy Chinese territory.
Accumulate, accumulate! That is Moses and the prophets!… Accumulation for the sake of accumulation, production for the sake of production: this was the historical mission of the bourgeoisie in the period of its domination …
— Karl Marx, Capital, Vol 1, Ch 25
The world is threatened with environmental disaster and capitalists hope to make a killing off of it. Fossil fuel (FF) companies claim they are “environmentally friendly.” Other corporations promote nuclear energy, hydro-power (dams), and solar and wind power as the best energy alternatives.
Yet environmentalists have known for decades that reduction of useless and harmful energy is the “greenest” form of energy available. Over 50 years ago, the first Earth Day recognized this with the slogan “Reduce; Reuse; Recycle.” Today, corporate “environmentalism” chants “Recycle; Occasionally Reuse; and, Never Utter ‘Reduce.’” Even mentioning the word “reduce” can be met with howls of derision that “Reduction means ‘austerity,’” as if any type of collective self-control would plunge the world into depths of suffering.
This can lead to a belief that supporting “alternative energy” (AltE) allows everyone on Earth to pursue a lifestyle of endless consumerism. It avoids the real problem, which is capitalism’s uncontrollable drive for economic growth.
Overproduction for What Purpose?
Acceptance of consumerism hides the twin issues that AltE creates its own disastrous outcomes and that lowering the amount of harmful production would actually improve the quality of life. Simply decreasing the amount of toxic poisons required for overproduction would cut down on cancers, brain damage, birth defects and immune system disorders.
No one would suffer from the massive toxins that would be eliminated by halting the manufacture of military armaments or disallowing the design of electrical devices to fall apart. Very few would be inconvenienced by discontinuing lines of luxury items which only the 1% can afford to purchase.
Food illustrates of how lowering production has nothing to do with worsening our lives. Relying on food produced by local communities instead of food controlled by international corporations would mean eliminating the processing of food until it loses most nutritional value. It would mean knowing many of the farmers who grow our food instead of transporting it over 2000 miles before it reaches those who eat it. It would cut out advertising hyper-sugarfied food to kids.
When I first began studying environmentalism over 30 years ago, I remember hearing that if a box of corn flakes costs $1, then 1¢ went to the farmer and $.99 went to the corporations responsible for processing the corn, packaging it, transporting the package and advertising it. Reduction does not mean “doing without” – it means getting rid of the crap.
Closely linked to food is health. My book on Cuban Health Care: The Ongoing Revolution points out that the island nation’s life expectancy is longer and infant mortality lower than that in the US while it spends less than 10% per person of what the US does. Reducing energy devoted to health care does not mean less or worse care. It means getting rid of the gargantuan unnecessary and expensive components which engulf health care in capitalist society.
Electric vehicles (EVs) embody collective environmental amnesia. Once upon a time, not too many decades ago, people wrote of walkable/bikeable communities and some even put their dreams to the test. Well … crush that dream. Since AltE has become a fad, the idea of redesigning urban space is being dumped so that every person can have at least one EV. Memory of environmental conservation has fallen into oblivion.
Not Getting Better All the Time
Despite the hype about AltE, capitalist use of energy is expanding, not contracting. We are constantly told to buy the latest electronic gadget – and the time period between successive versions of gadgets gets shorter and shorter. AltE exacerbates the crisis of capitalist energy by distracting society from practicing conservation.
The Bitcoin Ponzi scheme reveals the expansion of energy in the service of uselessness. Jessica McKenzie describes a coal-burning power plant in Dresden, NY. The plant was shut down because the local community had no use for its energy. But Bitcoin needed energy to compute its complex algorithms. So, like Dracula, the coal plant rose from the dead, transformed into a gas burning plant.
What, exactly, are Democratic Party politicians like Joe Biden, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and even Bernie Sanders doing to put the brakes on this expansion of FFs in programs like the Green New Deal (GND)? Actually, nothing. As Noam Chomsky points out in his forward to Stan Cox’ The Green New Deal and Beyond, “… the GND does not challenge the fossil-fuel industry.” Congressional proposals leave out the most critical part of reducing FFs – limiting the total quantity that can be produced. Instead, they rely on the fantasy that increasing AltE will somehow cause a decrease in FF use. This is a myth that we know all too well: corporate politicians toss around empty phrases like “net zero” as they further proposals to add AltE to the energy mix in.
Are Problems with AltE “Minimal?”
Despite stated goals to “end” FF production by such-and-such a date, the high heat they generate is essential for producing (1) silicon wafers for solar panels, (2) concrete and steel used in construction of windmills and dams, and (3) plastic coverings for industrial windmill blades. Every type of AltE requires FFs. Supporters of AltE often say that it is so much smaller as to pale by comparison to direct use of FFs.
Claiming that the amount of FFs used by AltE is trivial ignores both the quantities actually being used now and, most importantly, the uncontrollable urge of capitalism toward infinite growth. Hydro-power (dams) is currently the greatest source of AltE and is in line to expand most rapidly. Ben Gordesky describes research showing that “Canadian large-scale hydro projects have an ongoing carbon footprint that is approximately 40% that of electricity generated by burning natural gas. These emissions do not include the carbon footprint of dam construction.” This is not a trivial amount of FFs used by dams, especially since hydropower “is expected to grow by at least 45% by 2040.”
Estimates are that “Solar and wind have a carbon footprint of 4% to 8% of natural gas.” For the sake of simpler arithmetic, let’s say that hydro, wind and solar average 12.5% of the carbon footprint of FFs (even though is it probably much higher). Then, let’s say that healthy capitalism grows at least 3% annually (even though the phrase “healthy capitalism” is highly dubious), which means a doubling in size every 25 years. If AltE requires 12.5% of the equivalent FFs now, then,
in 25 years it will require what is twice that, or 25% of current FF use;
at 50 years, it again doubles (to four times its current size), requiring 50% of current FF use; and,
at 75 years, the economy doubles (to eight times its current size), reaching 100% of current use.
To put it bluntly, reliance on AltE in no way eliminates FF usage – in only 75 years economic growth would return us to current FF levels.
But would we have to wait 75 years to see current levels of FF restored? For some parts of the economy, the answer is definitely “No.” As Stan Cox documents, “… the huge increase in mines, smelters, factories and transportation required for this transition [to EVs] would continue heightened CO2 levels long before any emission savings would be realized.”
It might be possible theoretically to concentrate energy to reach the extremely high temperatures necessary for production of wind turbines and silicon wafers for solar arrays. Relying on Cox’ calculations, expanding infrastructure to reach 100% AltE by 2030 “… would require a 33-fold increase in industrial expansion, far more than has ever been achieved anywhere and would result in complete ecological devastation. One little fact regarding this quantity of build-up is that 100% RE would require more land space than used for all food production and living areas in the 48 contiguous states.”
Time for Despair?
Is it time to throw up our hands in despair that the only route to preserve humanity is a return to hunter/gatherer existence? Not really. Focusing on local, community-based energy can create sufficient production for human needs.
Many underestimate the ability of low tech devices. When in high school during the 1960s, my science project was a solar oven that could cook via medium heat. When I returned from college a few years later, my mom intimated that my dad, an engineer, thought that a solar reflector device could not possibly generate much heat. So, one morning he used it as a greenhouse for his vegetable seedlings. When he returned later that day, the plants were fried.
Solar power does not require high-tech based on massive arrays. Few techniques are more powerful at reducing energy than a passive house design or use of passive solar for existing homes. It is even possible to run a website via low tech solar without destroying farmland for gargantuan solar arrays.
For more than two thousand years, windmills were built from recyclable or reusable materials: wood, stone, brick, canvas, metal… It’s only since the arrival of plastic composite blades in the 1980s that wind power has become the source of a toxic waste product that ends up in landfills. New wood production technology and design makes it possible to build larger wind turbines almost entirely out of wood again… This would make the manufacturing of wind turbines largely independent of fossil fuels and mined materials.
A Global Struggle
The obsession of capitalism with expanding production is a social disease that infects every aspect of exploring, mining, transporting, using and disposing of energy infrastructure. For decades, this has been painfully obvious for FFs and nuclear power. Except for those who refuse to see, the opposition rippling through AltE is increasingly clear.
The two key words common to all of these efforts is “Stop it!” A better life for all begins with rejecting the limitless growth of capitalism by developing technologies that minimize mining, processing, over-producing goods with short durations, and transporting products over long distances. Instead, we must develop locally-based products that have the least harmful effects. One of the main problems with tunnel visioning on AltE is that how that approach accepts and perpetuates the ideology of greed, which insists that everyone in the US (and, of course, the world) must adopt the consumerist life-style of the upper middle class.
Everyone in the world believes in preserving what they hold sacred. For most of us, these include sacred places and beings, the inorganic world, creatures that sleep in water or on land, and human Life. For others, what they hold most sacred is corporate profits.
For the last 15 months, since the first economy-wide shutdowns because of the pandemic, in-the-streets activism on the political Left has been rare. The huge exception was the massive, Black-led, multi-racial response of many millions of people all around the country last summer after George Floyd was murdered. Another exception is the heroic fight led by Indigenous women in Minnesota against the building of another tar sands pipeline, Line 3, across Anishinaabe and other land. Tomorrow, June 7, could see a thousand or more people risking arrest as part of that months-long direct action campaign.
The Sunrise Movement is also shifting gears, away from the zoom-call-only mode into something much more visible. Several days ago they sat in at the White House and on June 28 they are planning a major DC action—Biden Be Brave, No Compromise, No Excuses–demanding that “Democrats must take their power seriously and stop negotiating with a GOP which is not serious about climate action or delivering jobs for the American people.”
Also in late June, from the 20th to the 28th, there will be a 2021 Walk for Our Grandchildren from Scranton, Pa. to Wilmington, De. “to remind the Biden Administration and others that our love for our families and their futures requires a rapid, uncompromising transition away from unhealthy, unsafe extraction and burning of fossil fuels while embracing renewable energy, especially solar and wind power.”
This upsurge of in the streets activism is happening, not coincidentally, at the same time that COVID 19 is being defeated, at least in the US and at least for now. This is the case primarily because of the effectiveness of the vaccines and the effectiveness of the vaccination campaign begun on January 20 when Biden/Harris took office. The science is telling us that, at least for this summer, many things that couldn’t happen over the last 15 months now can.
It is essential that our movement of movements on a wide range of issues recognize and act upon this new reality. From a strategic perspective, as far as how fundamental social, economic, political and cultural change happens, actions in the streets are essential. We must intelligently organize public marches, demonstrations, work and hunger strikes and nonviolent direct actions that underline the seriousness of our issue campaigns, inspire millions of people who hear about them, and bring pressure to bear on decision-makers to do the right and needed things.
This is not the only thing we need to be doing. It is also essential that our movement be grounded in day-to-day, community-, workplace-, and issue-based organizing by millions of volunteer and paid activists and organizers, utilizing popular education, dialogical approaches and techniques as much as possible. And we need to engage in the electoral arena, supporting independent and progressive candidates, and sometimes, for tactical reasons, people like Biden because of the threat from the Trumpists, racists and neo-fascists. We need do this from the most local to the highest national level, doing so in a tactically flexible way as far as whether to run on a Democrat, independent, Working Families, Green, or other line.
At any one time, one of these three legs of our movement-building stool—street action, electoral action and day-to-day dialogical organizing—will take precedence. In 2020 electoral action was the priority. Right now street action, holding those elected accountable, bringing political pressure to bear, has to be the priority, and not just via zoom calls. It’s time to hit the streets!
On April 24, 2021, US President Joseph Biden declared that the massacre of 1.5 million Turkish Armenians in 1915 constituted genocide. As to whether genocide is the word Americans can consent to use about Native Americans who suffered death, torture, displacement, apartheid and disease at the hands, mainly, of European settlers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is a lot less clear, although some state governors have gone for it. As for slavery, not until July 2008 did the US House of Representatives apologize for American slavery of blacks and the subsequent discriminatory laws and practices that have continued to marginalize and oppress a population that today constitutes over 47 million or 14% of the US population. 9 States have officially apologized for their involvement in the enslavement of Africans.
European and American histories are replete with massacres, genocides, and unjust applications of overwhelmingly disproportionate force against indigenous peoples and others who have stood in the way of the material interests of their invaders and conquerors. The US slow determination to condemn Turkey for crimes not dissimilar to those that it has itself committed, abundantly, and in recent history, serves the cause of an official hypocrisy that has long characterized US foreign policy – bedazzling, confusing or distracting its own domestic citizenry from the ugliness of forever imperialism.
Biden’s charge was a politically nuanced expression of growing US dissatisfaction with its NATO partner even if, by the same token, it extended a measure of sympathy to the former Soviet and still pro-Russian nation of Armenia, which had suffered at the hands of Azerbaijan and its ally, Turkey, in the 2020 battle for and successful acquisition of disputed territories of Nagorno-Karabakh. Might Armenia, possibly overcome by US moral magnanimity, wrench itself further away from the sphere of Russian influence and look with greater favor upon the USA? Nagorno-Karabakh was an autonomous oblast in Azerbaijan but sharing religious, cultural, and linguistic features of neighboring Armenia. In 1988 the parliament of Nagorno-Karabakh had voted to unify with Armenia. A UN Security Council resolution in 1993 called on Armenia to withdraw its forces from the Azerbaijani district of Kelbajar. Turkey imposed an economic embargo on Armenia and the border was closed. The eruption of hostilities in 2020 was possibly triggered by Armenia’s decision to restore an old border checkpoint, located 15km from Azerbaijan’s export pipelines or by an Azerbaijani incursion into Armenian territory.
Turkish relations with Turkic Azerbaijan, whose population is around 10 million, and with whom it shares 11 miles of border have always been strong. Turkey has helped Azerbaijan realize its economic potential from the Caspian Sea by purchasing Azerbaijani gas and cooperating with Azerbaijan and Georgia in infrastructural projects such as the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline and the Trans-Anatolian pipeline that connects to the Trans-Adriatic Pipeline (TAP) at the Turkish border with Greece at Kipoi.
A Renascent Empire
It is doubtful that Biden’s endorsement of the “G” word will do much to further complicate relations between the USA and Turkey, but it represents a good moment to pause and reassess what those complications are and the directions in which they point for the future of global peace and conflict. For the major questions today are not to do with the question of genocide as such but with whether, having breathed new life into the Ottoman corpse, Turkey rejoins the ranks of forever empires and, if so, the regional and global impacts this will have. The questions invoke more than empirical calculations of national interest since they have as much or more to with religion (especially Sunni Islam), transnational ethnic (Turkic) identity, national regeneration, energy policy under conditions of climate change and, not least, social class and gender inequities.
That Turkey is a renascent empire is clear enough. By 2021, Turkey had engaged in barely contested or recent uncontested military actions in Iraq, Syria and Libya, had played proxies in South Caucasus and Yemen while engaging in disputes with Greece, strongly supporting the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, and aspiring eastward along the pan-Turkic horizon towards western China. On February 19, 2021, the nationalistic State-owned Turkish television station TRT1 showed a map of the territories it claimed Turkey would control within the next thirty years. They included many Russian and FSU territories including Rostov, Volgograd, Astrakhan, Samara Oblasts, Chuvashia, Chechnya, Dagestan, Adygea, North Ossetia, and Crimea, including Sevastopol. Turkey was predicted to extend its sphere of influence to include Greece, southern Cyprus, Libya, Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Oman, Yemen, Gulf countries, Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, and Kazakhstan. Curiously, the map originated in a book published in 2009 by the founder of Stratfor Center for Research in International Politics.
It might be appropriate to laugh this off as fanciful delusion, as did many Russian commentators, but by 2021 it was at least clear that Turkey had considerably and aggressively expanded its regional and global influence. Turkey had joined the Council of Europe in 1950 and the European Customs Union in 1995 and embarked on negotiations for membership of the EU in 1999. Yet mirroring the pro-Islamist orientations of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan Justice and Development Party (AKP) that has held power continuously since 2003 — and in a corrective to the overly coercive imposition of western legal, cultural, and technological practices by the country’s founder Kemal Ataturk from 1923 (sustained by the military up until its participation in an attempted coup against Erdogan in 2016) – the AKP has exerted a strong eastward pull in recent years. This was partly cause and partly result of the stalling in 2015 of negotiations for entry to the EU, reflecting EU concerns about human rights and the rule of law, particularly in the light of the merger in 2015 of the AKP with the anti-European Nationalist Movement Party. In addition, the escalation of Turkish tensions with fellow NATO member Greece, as Turkey pressed claims to the right to prospective oil and gas deposits in what may be Greek maritime territories, has further impaired its image in Brussels.
A Militaristic Empire of Bases, Interventions, and Soft Power
Turkish forces were mainly instrumental in bringing about the formation of the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (TRNC) in 1974. This gained independence in 1983 but is only recognized by Turkey. Since 2018, Turkey has occupied a significant stretch of Syrian land along Turkey’s border with Syria, enveloping as many as five million people.
Earlier, it had invaded northern Iraq in its perpetual quest to subjugate Kurdish populations. Turkish armed attacks in Iraq started in 2007 with an air attack involving 50 fighter jets. Turkey’s 2008 “Operation Sun” involved 10,000 troops. Turkey would likely be an influential party to the takeover by NATO, involving 5,000 NATO troops, of US training and military operations in Iraq from 2021.
It was engaged in the conflict in southern Yemen through its support for the country’s local branch (the Reform Party) of the Muslim Brotherhood, which is represented in the government of Prime Minister Maeen Abdulmalik Saeed based in the south-eastern port city of Aden, thus helping fill the vacuum created by the downfall of the Ali Abdullah Saleh regime in February 2012 and an Iranian-staged coup by Houthi militia against President Abd Rabbo Mansour Hadi in March 2015. This raised concern in Egypt that Turkey’s efforts to increase its presence near the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, through which Gulf oil is transported before reaching the Suez Canal, will threaten the security of Egypt and the Arabian Gulf. Turkey maintains a military base in Djibouti, has tried to gain a foothold both in Somalia and the Sudanese Red Sea island of Suakin.
Altogether, Turkey maintained bases in Qatar, Libya, Somalia, Northern Cyprus, Syria, and Iraq. Turkey had established a strong alliance with the UN-approved Government of National Accord (the GNA) in Tripoli, Libya, by agreeing to establish an Exclusive Economic Zone in the Mediterranean as a step towards claiming rights to ocean bed resources, and by stationing Turkish forces in January 2020 in defense of Tripoli against the forces of a rival government based in Tobruk, eastern Libya, under former CIA asset Khalifa Belasis Haftar, commander of the Libyan National Army. While the UN Secretary General registered the deal on October 1, 2020, the Tobruk government (supported by the EU, Greece, Russia, Egypt, Cyprus, Malta, France, Germany, Italy, Sweden, Serbia, Syria, Israel, Bahrain. Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Arab League) denounced Turkey’s agreement with the GNA as illegal. Notably, Greece protested that it ignored the presence of Greek islands Crete, Kasos, Karpathos, Kastellorizo and Rhodes, and their respective maritime borders. Turkey’s seismic survey ships and navy vessels regularly clash with Greek vessels near the Greek island of Kastellorizo. In August 2020, Greece and Egypt signed their own maritime deal in response, an exclusive economic zone for oil and gas drilling rights. Yet Turkey wields considerable influence over the coalition government that was established in March 2021.
Turkey played a significant role in support of Azerbaijan in the war between Azerbaijan and Armenia in 2021. Turkey’s President Erdogan was the guest of honor at the Azerbaijani victory ceremony in Baku in December 2020, and hailed the “one nation, two states” relationship between Turkey and Azerbaijan.
In the gathering conflict over water rights between Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan in spring 2021, it was expected that Turkey (leader of the Cooperation Council of Turkic-Speaking States which comprises Turkey, Kazakhstan, and Uzbekistan) would side with Kyrgyzstan, which considers itself a Turkic nation. Tajikistan speaks a language that is related to predominantly Iranian languages Farsi and Dari.
Turkish influence is further enhanced by its considerable diaspora, giving Turkey some leverage over the internal politics of advanced nations with large Turkish immigrant populations, including France and Germany. This extends beyond Turkish ethnic communities as such to all Muslim communities, especially Sunni, open to persuasion that the Turkish state speaks on behalf of the Islamic world. Turkish charities have been active among the 5.7 million Muslims in France, for example, where 50% of imams are trained in turkey and serve Turkish interests while benefitting from Qatari funding.
In addition to its international interventions Turkey’s natural assets grant it considerable leverage over global and regional trade, and military uses of the Turkish straits, Black Sea and Sea of Azov.
A Troubling US and European Ally
Turkey has been a principal ally of the USA throughout much of the Syrian conflict, following the uprisings against the Baathist regime of Bashar Assad in 2011. Experts are divided as to the extent to which these were genuine outpourings of Arab-Spring demands for more democracy, on the one hand, or incited, exploited and expropriated by jihadist movements, including the Muslim Brotherhood — that thirty years previously had staged a violent campaign against Hafez al-Assad, Bashar’s father — and for which there was considerable support from Sunni Turkey as well as funding from Qatar. Turkey turned a blind eye to CIA and jihadist trafficking of fighters and materiel across the border with Syria and allowed itself to be used as a base for oppositional groups. (See also here). Despite a souring of US-Turkish relations following the attempted “Gülen” coup in 2016 against Turkish President Erdogan (who claimed that the USA had harbored its alleged progenitor, Muhammed Fethullah Gülen), the USA did little or nothing to contain a Turkish invasion of northern Syria that year, even though its most prominent victims were US allies, the Kurds, thousands of whose families around Afrin were displaced to make room for hundreds of thousands of oppositional Syrians and foreigners. Some of the new arrivals were bussed up from Ghouta under the terms of a deal agreed between Turkey and Russia. Turkey set up its own administration in the area, and incorporated it within Turkish electricity grid, cellphone networks and currency. It trained and incorporated oppositional militia who were integrated into a military police force, while establishing compliant local Syrian councils to run things. 500 Syrian companies were registered for cross-border trade. In 2019 the USA appeared to greenlight a further Turkish invasion by removing (some) US troops from the area, and in 2020 Turkey stood against a Russian and Syrian offensive on Idlib, although sources differ as to whether it was a win or a lose for Turkey. A continued Turkish occupation of northern Syria assists the USA and NATO in a medium-term policy, following a decade of inconclusive war, to impoverish and destabilize what remains of Assad’s Syria, even as some Arab nations, like the UAE and Saudi Arabia, seek a road back to Damascus despite steep US sanctions that stand in their way. Turkish intervention in Syria has come at a high price: 3.7 million Syrian refugees on top of a domestic population of 84 million, and this in time will likely prove a major source of domestic aggravation. Whether Turkey’s Syrian intervention has achieved greater national security against Kurdish PKK insurrectionists or, to the contrary, consolidated Kurdish opposition to Turkey and provoked an assured succession of Kurdish terrorist attacks into the foreseeable future, is moot.
Turkey has proven helpful to the USA as a member of NATO since 1952, its hosting of US military and air bases (notably Incirlik) and nuclear weapons and, more recently, in its military assistance to Azerbaijan against the much weaker Armenian (and Russian) interests in Nagorno-Karabakh (which Russia did little or nothing to defend despite Armenia’s membership of the Russian-led Collective Treaty Security Organization [CTSO], and despite Azerbaijan’s shooting down of a Russian helicopter over Armenian territory).
Turkey provided robust support for the US-backed coup regime of President Zelensky in Ukraine against Russia, including the sale to Ukraine of up to 17 unmanned aerial vehicles in 2019, persistent refusal to recognize Russian annexation of Crimea in 2014 (to which Turkey itself may lay historical claim), [There was a referendum where Crimeans voted overwhelmingly to join Russia — DV Ed] its assistance to the anti-Russian Tatars of Crimea, its cooperative partnerships with anti-Russian Georgia, and its control over access from the Aegean to the Black Sea (through the Turkish straits which include the Bosporus, sea of Marmara and Dardanelles), which it helps to patrol, and the Sea of Azov. In all these and other ways Turkey has contributed to US and NATO efforts to harass and contain Russia.
Troubled US Patron
The USA is not happy with (and has implemented sanctions in retaliation for) Turkey’s purchase in 2017 of Russia’s S-400 military defense system. The purchase had helped Turkey atone for its shooting down, for little apparent reason, of a Russian Sukhoi Su-24M attack aircraft in 2015 that had allegedly strayed into air space above the formerly Syrian province of Hatay – Syrian rebels shot the pilot as he descended by parachute and downed a rescue helicopter – constituting the first NATO downing of a Russian or Soviet warplane since an attack on the Sui-ho Dam during the Korean War in 1953. The USA is also irritated by Turkey’s conciliatory stance towards Nord Stream 2 and its involvement in TurkStream 1 and TurkStream 2, all of which facilitate the delivery of Gazprom oil and gas to Europe and impede US designs on the European market for its liquefied natural gas (LNG).
Turkey’s Bi-Polar Economy
Turkey’s economy has grown considerably in the 21st century, with average GDP growth averaging 5.4% 2003-2013 and, apart from China, Turkey outperformed all its peers in the fourth quarter of 2020. Turkey’s GDP growth of 5.9% was faster than for the G-20 nations in 2020 excepting China’s 6.5% rate. Its relations with China and China’s Belt and Road initiative are robust, even to the point of Turkish disinclination to intervene in the controversies over allegations of China’s treatment of the Turkic Uyghurs, another source of immigration to Turkey.
Yet Turkey’s currency is fragile. The lira collapsed 50% against the US dollar 2017-2020, and inflation hit 15% in 2019 in response to government’s resort to printing money via its ownership of the Central Bank. While net national debt is a healthy 35.2% of GDP, foreign currency reserves are relatively low and inflation is high. The currency crisis reflects domestic political instability, international diplomatic errors, a balance of trade deficit, over-reliance on construction for growth, and over-dependence on foreign currency loans in the private sector. The Covid 19 epidemic badly bruised Turkey’s income from tourism. The crisis intensified in the final quarter of 2020 with the resignation of Turkey’s finance minister (son-in-law to President Erdogan) and ouster of the head of the Central Bank, following a precipitate further collapse of the lira. Erdogan took the opportunity to reassure the investment community of his faith in financial profiteering and in Turkey as a globally attractive source of cheap labor. Foreign investors likely to be of considerable importance in efforts to stabilize the Turkish economy include China, which is expected to participate in the Istanbul Canal project, and Qatar, which promised billions of new investments at the end of 2020.
The Energy Factor
Energy lies close not just to the country’s economy but to the existential center of neo-Ottomanism and its many apparent contradictions between domination, self-sufficiency, and dependency. It has both nurtured and stifled Turkey’s vacillating economy. This dynamic plays out in at least four principal ways:
Control over oil, gas, and other energy flows by tanker through the Turkish (Bosporus) straits and a planned additional waterway, Erdogan’s pet project, the Istanbul Canal. As a hub for the supply of gas from Central Asia, Russia and the Middle East to Europe and other Atlantic markets, Turkey exercises enormous potential leverage over other nations that is immediately susceptible to political manipulation. State-owned corporations are powerful players in Turkish energy politics. They include TPAO for petroleum, domestically producing 7% of Turkish petrol consumption; BOTAS, the state-owned Petroleum Pipeline Corporation; and state-owned Tupras which controls 85% of Turkey’s refinery capacity. Countries that border the Black and Azov Seas are significantly dependent on the Bosporus Straits for passage of imports and exports. Many ports on the Azov ship grain to Turkey, for example. Russia exerts significant control over passage from the Black to the Azov seas via the Kerch strait, half of which it owns. Future monetization of Turkey’s advantage as gatekeeper of the potential Bosporus chokehold will likely be enhanced by construction of the Istanbul Canal which may not be constrained, it is thought, by the Montreux Convention of 1936 that currently regulates conditions of passage through the Straits, and that will permit Turkey to charge additional fees in return for speedier, more expansive permissions and passage. Critics fear the costs (an estimated $15 billion) of such an enormous enterprise and its environmental consequences. Russia fears that that the new canal will facilitate Black Sea access for NATO ships.
Permission for and participation in the construction of regional pipelines (as in the Trans-Anatolian pipeline that delivers Azeri gas from the Caspian to the Trans-Aegean pipeline and on to Europe). Pipeline fees of passage are an important source of revenue. In 2021, Turkey had four long-term pipeline contracts with Russia, Azerbaijan, and Iran. Two major pipelines include the BTC (Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan), linking Turkey, George and Azerbaijan, and the Iraqi Pipeline from northern Iraq to Ceyhan (in the southeast corner of Turkey). The Kurdish Regional Government (KRG) pipeline runs from Erbil in Iraq to Ceyhan. Ceyhan is an important port for Caspian and Iraqi oil imports. Under the US Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act of 2017, the US has sanctioned both TurkStream 1 & 2. But these are of declining significance to Turkey, in any case, given the competition from the Sakarya gas field in the Black Sea, and transit fees for passage through the new Istanbul canal that will likely prove more lucrative than pipeline fees. Another imminent threat to TurkStream 2 is the north-south corridor formed by Greece, Turkey and Ukraine that can be fed by LNG from the Mediterranean with reverse flows back to Ukraine.
The purchase of Liquefied Natural Gas from the USA and other suppliers (Turkey is a primary destination for US LNG) and its rerouting by pipeline, tanker, or truck – a development that reduces the significance of regional pipelines, affords Turkey more flexibility in routing and also the blocking of competitors, and puts the USA in a potentially strong competitive position against Russia’s Nord Stream 1&2 and TurkStream 1&2 for delivery of gas to Europe. LNG gas imports from the USA, Qatar, Algeria, Nigeria were cheaper in 2021 than constructed pipeline gas from Gazprom. Turkey was now Europe’s third largest importer of US LNG behind Spain and France.
The development of new oil and gas fields in the Eastern Mediterranean, Aegean, and Black Seas. These acquire considerable relevance in the context of Turkey’s near total oil and gas dependency, which has been a major economic stumbling block. Almost all (99%) of Turkey’s natural gas was imported in 2015, of which 56% came from Russia’s Gazprom (other suppliers were Iran and Azerbaijan), although Russia’s share had fallen to 34% by 2019. Turkey spent $41 billion on natural gas imports alone in 2019. 60% of Turkey’s crude oil imports are from Iraq and Iran, and 11% from Russia (2015). This very dependence has served as inspiration to Turkey to establish its own supplies of fossil fuel both in the Eastern Mediterranean, in partnership with Libya (where both the US and Russia have tacitly supported a policy of opposition to new developments lest these compete with their own exports) and in the Black Sea.
In August 2020, President Erdogan announced a major find (320 billion cubic meters but may well prove much more) of natural gas reserves in the Black Sea within the western part of Turkey’s Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) – the Sakarya field, on the perimeter of Bulgaria’s and Romania’s maritime borders. Critics worry about the costs of deep-water drilling and extraction from Sakarya, an ultra-harsh environment. Erdogan has expressed his desire that Turkey should develop Sakarya independently but, if the capability of TPAO falls short, involvement of non-Turkish majors could eat into profits considerably. For the longer term and as the impacts of climate change intensify, Turkey’s energy plans are uncomfortably wedded to planetary-menacing fossil fuel while at home, coal constitutes 40% of Turkey’s domestic energy production in conditions of escalating demand.
Favoring Greece
US unhappiness with Turkey as a partner stands at a crossroads. Turkey remains a strategically useful regional proxy force for the USA, alongside Israel, for the advancement of US interests in Syria. This can last indefinitely, even as Israeli preoccupation with Turkey’s expansion intensifies and as Turkey’s bid for leadership of Sunni Islam proves more compelling. This is particularly true of the Palestinian cause in Israeli-occupied Gaza. Turkish humanitarian organizations were behind the Gaza Freedom Flotilla of six ships in 2010 that sought to bring relief to the Gaza Strip. The ships were forcibly detained by Israeli forces in international waters and 10 Turkish activists were slaughtered. Israel has since paid compensation.
The recent surprising alliance between the USA and Israel may be seen in this light, i.e. as Israel’s targeting of Turkey, not Iran, while Turkish interventions are perceived by the UAE, Egypt, and the Arab League as a threat to Arab security, a perspective that is shared by France and probably other European powers. UAE’s Foreign Affairs minister has even said that the UAE wants Turkey to stop supporting the Muslim Brotherhood, bête noire of Sisi’s post-Morsi Egypt and Syria’s Assad regime, among others. Turkey’s bid for Sunni leadership, therefore, cannot advance far in competition with powerful regional rivals, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt but, in as much as both Saudis and Egypt have recklessly betrayed the Palestinian cause in their attempt to maintain US favor, Turkey has uncovered a strong and unpredictable weapon of soft power. Turkey’s capability as US proxy in the Turkic world will prove increasingly useful as the USA persists in its attempt to destabilize, fragment, contain and threaten the Russian Federation and in its gathering assault on Chinese power. But on the other hand, Turkey’s quest for independent power may lead it towards seemingly unlikely alliances with Azerbaijan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and China, possibly in league with Russia and Iran, against the USA and India in Asia. There have been two trilateral summits between Turkey, Azerbaijan, and Pakistan (2017, 2021). It is envisaged that there may be nuclear cooperation between Pakistan and Turkey (Pakistan has nuclear warheads), and Russia is building 4 nuclear energy plants in Turkey. China has supplied missile technology. The further the USA moves away from Turkey, the closer, inevitably, Turkey will draw towards Russia with implications for the way Turkey chooses to nurture its ties to Turkic powers within and close to the borders of the Russian Federation.
In the Western world, on the other hand, the USA has increasingly less cause for sympathy with Turkish ambitions since these irritate both the European Union and NATO. US disillusionment may go so far as a US withdrawal of its military facilities in Turkey (including its air base in Incirlik and NATO’s Land Command in Şirinyer, Izmir) in favor of Greece as its new major Mediterranean center of operations, embracing new or expanded US facilities in Souda (Crete), Volos, Larissa, and Alexandroupolis. By 2025, Souda will become the largest and most important US naval base in the Eastern Mediterranean with 25,000 personnel. While Turkey has been suspended from the purchase of F-35 war planes since its purchase of Russian S-400 air defense in 2019, Greece is now planning expenditure of $3 billion on F-35s. A US-Greek Mutual Defense Cooperation Agreement signed in October 2010 provides a framework for this expanding partnership. In line with US favoring of Greece against Turkey, Greece is set to intensify cooperation with Israel, as in pipeline deals to bring Eastern Mediterranean gas to Europe. Andrew Lee has called this overall strategy a version of the “Intermarium” – a geopolitical concept originating in the post-World War 1 era that envisages an alliance of countries reaching from the Baltic Sea, over the Black Sea to the Aegean Sea that would serve as an alternative power bloc between Germany and Russia.
Conclusion
In conclusion we can infer the following:
(1) Turkey, released at least in part by Erdogan’s AKP from the foundational Ataturk mission of westernization and secularization, has rediscovered in Islamism an Ottoman legacy that could enable it to re-establish a regional, even a global influence – political, cultural, economic and military – throughout the Muslim and Turkic worlds and the Muslim diasporas of the non-Muslim and non-Turkic worlds.
(2) Combining and deploying the advantages of new sources of energy independence and its traditional chokehold power in the Bosporus (extended now to the Istanbul Canal), Turkey will ascquire a much stronger negotiating position in its relations with Russia, the USA and EU.
(3) Its economic fragilities notwithstanding, Turkey will grow in its attraction to international investors, particularly China, on account of its net international and regional energy networks.
(4) Turkey’s greater activity in the Middle East will be perceived as a growing threat to the established powers of Saudi Arabia and Egypt, to Israel and the UAE, while its growing involvement in Yemen may give it a stronger toehold in the politics of the Red Sea and Persian Gulf.
(5) In Syria, Turkey will for some time exercise a significant constraint on the restitution of Syrian sovereignty and therefore will be regarded with suspicion both by Iran and by Lebanon whose interests are directly impacted by deterioration of the Syrian economy.
(6) Domestically and regionally, Turkey must still worry about Kurdish irredentism which it has done little to soothe and much to anger. To this is added the pressure of a large, new, unsettled immigrant population of Syrian exiles.
(7) Through its recently established links with Libya, and its long-standing influence over Northern Cyprus, Turkey will be a stronger contender for influence in the eastern Mediterranean and north Africa.
(8) Most importantly, Turkey’s relatively recent and aggressive renascence in some of the world’s most strategically and militarily sensitive parts of the world exponentially increases the likelihood of reckless behavior – on the parts of many players – and unforeseen consequences any of which could easily ignite regional tensions, in conflagrations that almost certainly will suck in the world’s major nuclear powers.
It should be making officials in the White House tremble. Critical infrastructure supplying 45% of the East Coast’s diesel, gasoline and jet fuel, left at the mercy of a ransomware operation executed on May 6. In the process, 100 GB of data of Colonial Pipeline was seized and encrypted on computers and servers. The next day, those behind the operation demanded a ransom, or the material would be leaked.
The consequences are telling. The operator, taken offline to enable an investigation to be conducted by US cybersecurity firm Mandiant; fuel left stranded at refineries in Texas; a spike in fuel prices at the pump – up six cents per gallon on the week to $2.967 per gallon of unleaded gasoline. “Unless they sort it out by Tuesday,” warned oil market analyst Gaurav Sharma, “they’re in big trouble.” The impact would be felt first in Atlanta, then Tennessee, perpetuating a domino effect to New York. “This is the largest impact on the energy system in the United States we’ve seen from a cyberattack, full stop,” opined Rob Lee of the cybersecurity firm Dragos.
The company, in unconvincing tones, issued a statement that it was “continuing to work with third-party cybersecurity experts, law enforcement, and other federal agencies to restore pipeline operations quickly and safely.” President Joe Biden rushed to calm fears that this had compromised fuel security. “The agencies across the government have acted quickly to mitigate any impact on our fuel supply.” The deputy national security advisor for cyber and emerging technologies Anne Neuberger waffled to the press that the Biden administration was “taking a multi-pronged and whole-of-government response to this incident and to ransomware overall.”
On May 9, the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration within the Department of Transportation issued a temporary hours of service exemption for motor carriers and drivers “transporting gasoline, diesel, jet fuel and other refined petroleum products” across affected States.
Finding the culprit in such operations is almost boringly predictable. The Kremlin tends to get top billing on the list of accused, but on this occasion interest centred on DarkSide rather than President Vladimir Putin. “I’m gonna be meeting with President Putin,” promised Biden, “and so far there is no evidence, based on our intelligence people, that Russia is involved.” That did not mean that Russian officials were to be spared scrutiny. There was “evidence that the actors’ ransomware is in Russia – they have some responsibility to deal with this.” DarkSide, in other words, is being singled out as a bold and enterprising Russian cybercrime outfit, going where even intelligence operatives fear to tread. Out in that jungle of compromised cybersecurity, money is to be made.
DarkSide is cybercrime with a professional face, pirates and buccaneers of the internet with some understanding of public relations. They court the press when they need to. They even operate with a code of conduct in mind. And they are experienced. “Our goal is to make money and not creating problems for society,” lamented the group after the operation. “We do not participate in geopolitics, do not see need to tie us with a defined government and look for… our motives.” The firm claimed ignorance that one of its affiliates had taken it upon themselves to target Colonial. “From today, we introduce moderation and check each company that our partners want to encrypt to avoid social consequences in the future.”
This event has revealingly exposed the state of poorly protected critical infrastructure run by private companies. “When those companies are attacked,” remarked deputy national security advisor Elizabeth Sherwood-Randall, “they serve as the first line of defence, and we depend on the effectiveness of their defences.”
As security analyst Richard Stiennon described it, the decision to shut down the pipeline showed that Colonial understood the risks. “On the other hand, it shows that Colonial does not have 100% confidence in their operational systems’ cybersecurity defenses.” Colonial was doing its best to sound competent, stating that it “proactively took certain systems offline to contain the threat.”
A less generous reading of this is that the company never genuinely appreciated those risks, given inadequate backup systems or forking out funds for software with fewer vulnerabilities. The company had effectively issued an open invitation to be targeted, despite warnings made in early 2020 by the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency that a ransomware attack on a US-based natural gas compression facility had taken place.
The provider has done little in terms of clearing the air on how it will deal with the ransom threat. “Colonial is a private company and we’ll defer information regarding their decision on paying a ransom to them,” stated the less than helpful Neuberger. Neuberger also spoke of the “troubling trend … of targeting companies who have insurance and may be richer targets”. More had to be done to “determine what we do in addition to actively disrupting infrastructure and holding perpetrators accountable, to ensure we are not encouraging the rise of ransomware.”
The Biden administration is currently drafting an executive order that will create new digital safety regulations applicable to federal agencies and contractors who develop software for the government. Those developing the software would have to be compliant with adequate security safeguards. A layer of investigative bureaucracy is also contemplated: a cybersecurity incident review board.
At the very least, optimists in the field will see some value in having glaring faults in security systems exposed, even if it pertains to critical infrastructure. Cyber extortionists can be turned into constructive citizens, identifying vulnerabilities – for a price. A better option for corporate management and the boardroom would be to listen to the IT crowd.
It should be making officials in the White House tremble. Critical infrastructure supplying 45% of the East Coast’s diesel, gasoline and jet fuel, left at the mercy of a ransomware operation executed on May 6. In the process, 100 GB of data of Colonial Pipeline was seized and encrypted on computers and servers. The next day, those behind the operation demanded a ransom, or the material would be leaked.
The consequences are telling. The operator, taken offline to enable an investigation to be conducted by US cybersecurity firm Mandiant; fuel left stranded at refineries in Texas; a spike in fuel prices at the pump – up six cents per gallon on the week to $2.967 per gallon of unleaded gasoline. “Unless they sort it out by Tuesday,” warned oil market analyst Gaurav Sharma, “they’re in big trouble.” The impact would be felt first in Atlanta, then Tennessee, perpetuating a domino effect to New York. “This is the largest impact on the energy system in the United States we’ve seen from a cyberattack, full stop,” opined Rob Lee of the cybersecurity firm Dragos.
The company, in unconvincing tones, issued a statement that it was “continuing to work with third-party cybersecurity experts, law enforcement, and other federal agencies to restore pipeline operations quickly and safely.” President Joe Biden rushed to calm fears that this had compromised fuel security. “The agencies across the government have acted quickly to mitigate any impact on our fuel supply.” The deputy national security advisor for cyber and emerging technologies Anne Neuberger waffled to the press that the Biden administration was “taking a multi-pronged and whole-of-government response to this incident and to ransomware overall.”
On May 9, the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration within the Department of Transportation issued a temporary hours of service exemption for motor carriers and drivers “transporting gasoline, diesel, jet fuel and other refined petroleum products” across affected States.
Finding the culprit in such operations is almost boringly predictable. The Kremlin tends to get top billing on the list of accused, but on this occasion interest centred on DarkSide rather than President Vladimir Putin. “I’m gonna be meeting with President Putin,” promised Biden, “and so far there is no evidence, based on our intelligence people, that Russia is involved.” That did not mean that Russian officials were to be spared scrutiny. There was “evidence that the actors’ ransomware is in Russia – they have some responsibility to deal with this.” DarkSide, in other words, is being singled out as a bold and enterprising Russian cybercrime outfit, going where even intelligence operatives fear to tread. Out in that jungle of compromised cybersecurity, money is to be made.
DarkSide is cybercrime with a professional face, pirates and buccaneers of the internet with some understanding of public relations. They court the press when they need to. They even operate with a code of conduct in mind. And they are experienced. “Our goal is to make money and not creating problems for society,” lamented the group after the operation. “We do not participate in geopolitics, do not see need to tie us with a defined government and look for… our motives.” The firm claimed ignorance that one of its affiliates had taken it upon themselves to target Colonial. “From today, we introduce moderation and check each company that our partners want to encrypt to avoid social consequences in the future.”
This event has revealingly exposed the state of poorly protected critical infrastructure run by private companies. “When those companies are attacked,” remarked deputy national security advisor Elizabeth Sherwood-Randall, “they serve as the first line of defence, and we depend on the effectiveness of their defences.”
As security analyst Richard Stiennon described it, the decision to shut down the pipeline showed that Colonial understood the risks. “On the other hand, it shows that Colonial does not have 100% confidence in their operational systems’ cybersecurity defenses.” Colonial was doing its best to sound competent, stating that it “proactively took certain systems offline to contain the threat.”
A less generous reading of this is that the company never genuinely appreciated those risks, given inadequate backup systems or forking out funds for software with fewer vulnerabilities. The company had effectively issued an open invitation to be targeted, despite warnings made in early 2020 by the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency that a ransomware attack on a US-based natural gas compression facility had taken place.
The provider has done little in terms of clearing the air on how it will deal with the ransom threat. “Colonial is a private company and we’ll defer information regarding their decision on paying a ransom to them,” stated the less than helpful Neuberger. Neuberger also spoke of the “troubling trend … of targeting companies who have insurance and may be richer targets”. More had to be done to “determine what we do in addition to actively disrupting infrastructure and holding perpetrators accountable, to ensure we are not encouraging the rise of ransomware.”
The Biden administration is currently drafting an executive order that will create new digital safety regulations applicable to federal agencies and contractors who develop software for the government. Those developing the software would have to be compliant with adequate security safeguards. A layer of investigative bureaucracy is also contemplated: a cybersecurity incident review board.
At the very least, optimists in the field will see some value in having glaring faults in security systems exposed, even if it pertains to critical infrastructure. Cyber extortionists can be turned into constructive citizens, identifying vulnerabilities – for a price. A better option for corporate management and the boardroom would be to listen to the IT crowd.
The Green New Deal has attracted perhaps the greatest attention of any proposal for decades. It would guarantee Medicare-for-All, Housing-for-All, student loan forgiveness and propose the largest economic growth in human history to address unemployment and climate change.
But the last of these hits a stumbling block. Creation of all forms of energy contributes to the destruction of nature and human life. It is possible to increase the global quality of life at the same time we reduce the use of fossil fuels and other sources of energy. Therefore, a “deep” GND would focus on energy reduction, otherwise known as energy conservation. Decreasing total energy use is a prerequisite for securing human existence.
Recognizing True Dangers
Fossil fuel (FF) dangers are well-known and include the destruction of Life via global heating. FF problems also include land grabs from indigenous peoples, farmers, and communities throughout the world as well as the poisoning of air from burning and destruction of terrestrial and aquatic life from spills. But those who focus on climate change tend to minimize very real danger of other types of energy production. A first step in developing a genuine GND is to acknowledge the destructive potential of “alternative energy” (AltE).
Nuclear power (nukes). Though dangers of nuclear disasters such as Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima are horrific, problems with the rest of its life cycle are often glossed over. Mining, milling, and transporting radioactive material to supply nukes with fuel and “dispose” of it exposes entire communities to poisoning that results in a variety of cancers. Though operation of nukes produces few greenhouse gases (GHGs), enormous quantities are released during production of steel, cement and other materials for building nuclear plants. They must be located next to water (for cooling), which means their discharge of hot water is an attack on aquatic life. Radioactive waste from nukes, kept in caskets for 30-50 years, threatens to poison humanity not for decades or centuries, but for millennia (or eternity), which makes nukes at least as dangerous as FFs. Inclusion of nuclear power as part of a GND is not the slightest bit green. The only way to address nuclear power is how to abolish it as rapidly as possible while causing the least harm to those who depend on it for energy and income.
Solar power requires manufacturing processes with chemicals which are highly toxic to those who work with them. Even before production begins, many different minerals must be mined and processed, which endangers workers and communities while destroying wildlife habitat. Additional minerals must be obtained for batteries. Once solar systems are used, they are discarded into large toxic dumps. Though few GHGs are created during use of solar panels, large amounts are created during their life cycle.
Wind power creates its own syndrome of nerve-wracking vibrations for those living next to “wind farms,” along with even larger issues with disposal of 160-foot blades. Like solar farms, wind farms undermine ecosystems where they are located. The life cycle of wind power includes toxic radioactive elements to produce circular rotation of blades.
Hydro-power from dams hurts terrestrial as well as aquatic life by altering the flow of river water. Dams undermine communities whose culture center around water and animals. Dams destroy farms. They exacerbate international conflicts when rivers flow through multiple countries, threaten the lives of construction workers, and result in collapses which can kill over 100,000 people at a time.
Several problems run through multiple AltE systems:
Despite claims of “zero emissions,” every type of AltE requires large amounts of FFs during their life cycle;
Every type of AltE is deeply intertwined with attacks on civil liberties, land grabs from indigenous communities, and/or murders of Earth defenders;
Many have cost overruns which undermine the budgets of communities tricked into financing them.
Transmission lines require additional land grabs, squashing of citizen and community rights, and increased species extinctions; and,
Since the most available resources (such as uranium for nukes, sunny land for solar arrays, mountain tops for wind farms, rivers for dams) are used first, each level of expansion requires a greater level of resource use than the previous one, which means the harvesting of AltE is increasingly harmful as time goes by.
Taking into account the extreme problems of the life cycle of every type of energy extraction leads to the following requirements for a genuine GND: Nuclear energy must be halted as quickly and as safely as possible with employment replacement. FF extraction should be dramatically reduced immediately (perhaps by 70-90% of 2020 levels) and be reduced 5-10% annually for the next 10 years thereafter. Rather than being increased, extraction for other forms of energy should be reduced (perhaps 2-5% annually).
Since honesty requires recognition that every form of energy becomes more destructive with time, the critical question for a deep GND is: “How do we reduce energy use while increasing employment and the necessities of life?”
The Naming of Things
But before exploring how to increase employment while reducing production, it is necessary to clean up some greenwashing language that has become common in recent years.
Decades ago, Barry Commoner used the phrase “linguistic detoxification” to describe the way corporations come up with a word or phrase to hide the true nature of an ecological obscenity. One of the best examples is the nuclear industry’s term “spent fuel rods” which implies that, once used, fuel rods are not radioactive, when, in fact, they are so deadly that they must be guarded for eternity. An accurate term would be “irradiated fuel rods.”
Perhaps the classic example is the way agribusiness came up with “biosolids” for renaming animal sewage sludge containing dioxin, asbestos, lead, and DDT. As John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton describe in Toxic Sludge Is Good for You (1995), industry persuaded the Environmental Protection Agency to reclassify hazardous animal waste to “Class A fertilizer” biosolids so they could be dumped on fields where food is grown.
Rather than preserving traditions of early environmentalists, many current proponents of AltE use the terms “clean” and “renewable” to describe energy which is neither. AltE is not “clean” due to the many GHG emissions throughout the life cycle of all types of energy in addition to assaults on ecosystems and human health. Though the sun, wind and river power may be eternal, products that must be mined are very much exhaustible, meaning that no form of AltE is renewable.
An honest GND would never refer to AltE as either “clean” or “renewable.” Such a GND proposal would advocate the reduction of FFs but would not suggest a goal 0% of FFs by such-and-such a date because it is unattainable. Every type of AltE requires FFs. While it may be possible to produce some steel and some cement by AltE, it is impossible to produce massive quantities of energy for the entire world with AltE. Instead, a genuine GND would explain that the only form of clean energy is less energy and specify ways to use less energy while improving the quality of life.
A genuine GND would never imply that FFs are the only source of monstrously negative effects. Privileging AltE corporations over FF corporations is stating that environmental problems will be solved by choosing one clique of capitalists over another. This means that (a) if FFs should be nationalized, then all mining, milling and manufacturing processes to produced materials needed for AltE should be nationalized; and, (b) if FFs should remain in the ground, then all components for operating nuclear plants, dams, solar facilities and wind farms should also remain in the ground.
A Shorter Work Week for All
The greatest contradiction in current versions of the GND is advocating environmental improvement while having the most massive increase in production the world has ever seen. These two goals are completely irreconcilable. A progressive GND would address this enigma via shortening the work week, which would reduce environmental damage by using less energy.
It is quite odd that versions of the GND call for Medicare-for-All, Housing-for-All, Student Loan Forgiveness-for-All; but none of them suggest a Shorter-Work-Week-for-All. The absence of this old progressive demand could be due to the incorrect neoliberal assumption that the best way to solve unemployment is via increased production.
Increased production of goods cannot create a long-term increase in employment. (It was WW II and not Roosevelt’s New Deal that consistently increased employment.) US production increased 300-fold from 1913 to 2013. If employment had increased at the same pace, everyone would be working at dozens of jobs today.
Unemployment increases from recent economic disruptions like the 2008 financial crisis and Covid in 2020 were due to the inability to shift work from some areas of the economy to others. A planned shrinking of the economy would require including the entire workforce in deciding to shift from negative to positive employment.
As the work week is reduced, every group of workers should evaluate what it does, how labor is organized, and how jobs should be redefined so that full employment is preserved. The only part of this idea which is novel is making changes democratically – job categories continuously change, with some types of work shrinking (or disappearing entirely) and other types of work expanding or coming into existence. Just as economic growth does not guarantee increases in employment, economic shrinking need not worsen unemployment if the work week is shortened.
However, a shorter work week will not accomplish environmental goals if it is accompanied by an “intensification of labor” (such as requiring workers at Amazon to handle more packages per hour or increasing class size for teachers). This means that a genuine GND requires workers’ forming strong unions which have a central role in determining what is produced as well as working conditions.
Producing According to Need Instead of According to Profit
If a core part of a GND becomes a shorter work week (without speed-up), the question naturally arises: “Will lowering the amount of production result in people going without basic necessities of life?” It is important to understand that production for profit causes the manufacture of goods that have no part of improving our lives.
Current versions of the GND are based on the neoliberal assumption that the best way to provide for necessities of life is through increased payments for purchases (ie, market economics). A progressive GND would advocate that the best way to provide the necessities of life is by guaranteeing them as human rights. This is often referred so as replacing individual wages with “social wages.” For example, the neoliberal approach to healthcare is offering medical insurance while a progressive approach is to offer medical care directly (without giving a cut to insurance companies). Likewise, a neoliberal GND would offer cash for food, housing, transportation, education and other necessities while a progressive GND would provide them directly to people. Green economics must be based on making dollar amounts less important by replacing individual wages with social wages.
Current versions of the GND seek to provide necessities by increasing the quantity of products rather than focusing on creating things that are useful, reliable and durable. A massive increase in production is an unnecessary attack on ecosystems when there is already much more production than required to provide essentials for everyone on the planet. Needs are not being met because of production which …
… is negative, including war materials, police forces and production which destroys farmland and habitat (all of which should be reduced immediately);
… is wasteful, which includes both (a) playthings of the richest 1%, and (b) things which many of us are forced to buy for survival and getting to work, the most notable being cars;
… requires unnecessary processing and transportation, the most notable example being food which is processed to lose nutritional value, packaged to absurd levels, and shipped over 1000 miles before being consumed; and,
… involves planned obsolescence, including design to fall apart or go out of style.
One important aspect of reducing production is often ignored. Each product manufactured must have a repairability index. At a minimum, criteria for the index should include (a) availability of technical documents to aid in repair, (b) ease of disassembly, (c) availability of spare parts, (d) price of spare parts, and (e) repair issues specific to the class of products. The index should become a basis for strengthening production requirements each year. A durablility index should similarly be developed and strengthened annually. Since those who do the labor of manufacturing products are more likely than owners or stockholders to attain knowledge of how to make commodities that are more reliable and durable, they must have the right to make their knowledge public without repercussions from management.
There will always be differences of opinion regarding what is needed versus what is merely desired. A progressive GND should state how those decisions would be made. A major cause of unnecessary production is that decisions concerning what to manufacture and standards for creating them are made by investors and corporate bosses rather than community residents and workers manufacturing them. A genuine GND would confront problems regarding what is produced by involving all citizens in economic decisions, and not merely the richest.
Reparations!
Perhaps the issue which is least likely to be linked to the GND is reparations to poor communities in Africa, Latin America, and Asia who have been victims of Western imperialism for 500 years. This connection forces us to ask: “Since most minerals necessary for AltE lie in poor countries, will rich countries continue to plunder their resources, exterminate what remains of indigenous cultures, force inhabitants to work for a pittance, jail and kill those who resist, destroy farmland, and leave the country a toxic wasteland for generations to come?”
For example, plans to massively expand electric vehicles (EVs) undermine the vastly more sustainable approach of urban redesign for walkable/cyclable communities. Plans would result in manufacturing EVs for the rich world while poor and working class communities would suffer from the extraction of lithium, cobalt and dozens of other materials required for these cars.
Africa may be the most mineral-rich continent. In addition to cobalt from the Democratic Republic of the Congo for EVs, Mali is the source of 75% of the uranium for French nukes, Zambia is mined for copper for AltE and hundreds of other minerals are taken from dozens of African countries.
If there are to be agreements involving corporations seeking minerals for AltE, who will those agreements be with? Will the agreements be between the ultra-rich owners of the Western empire and its puppet governments? Or, will extraction agreements be with villages and communities which will be most affected by removal of minerals for the production of energy?
Discussions of relationships between rich and poor countries make much of having “free, prior and informed consent” prior to an extraction project. Such an agreement is far from reality because (a) corporate and governmental bodies are so mired in corruption that they contaminate bodies which define and judge the meaning of “free, prior and informed,” (b) no prediction of the effects of extraction can be “informed” since it is impossible to know what the interaction of the multitude of physical, chemical, biological and ecological factors will be prior to extraction taking place, and (c) affected communities are typically bullied into accepting extraction because they fear that families will die from starvation, lack of medical care or unemployment if they do not do so. Thus, the following are essential components of a socially just GND:
Reparations which are sufficient to eliminate poverty must be paidprior to signing extraction agreements; and,
Every community must have the right toterminate an extraction agreement at any stage of the project.
This is where the other meaning of “deep” comes in. When people hear “deep green,” they often think of how industrial activity deeply affects ecosystems. “Deep” can also refer to having a deep respect for poor communities whose lives are most affected by extraction. Respect is not deep if it is unwilling to accept an answer of “No” to a request for exorbitant, profit-gouging extraction. Peoples across the world may decide that since they have received so little for so long, it may be time for rich countries to share the wealth they have stolen and dig up new wealth much, much more slowly.
A New Green Culture
Just to make sure that it is clear and not forgotten, the fundamental question regarding extraction of material needed for AltE is: “Will rich countries continue to plunder minerals underneath or adjacent to poor communities at a rate that corporations decide? Will they expect poor communities to be satisfied with a vague promise that, for the very first time, great things will happen after the plundering? Or should reparations be fully paid for past and current plundering, with poor communities deciding how much extraction they will allow and at what speed?”
Essential for building a New Green World is the creation of a New Green Culture which asks all of the billions of people on the planet to share their ideas for obtaining the necessities of life while using less energy. Such a culture would aim for one idea to spark to many ideas, all of which strive more toward living together than on inventing energy-guzzling gadgets.
In order to build a New Green Culture which puts the sharing of wealth above personal greed, several things that must happen:
To bring billions of people out of economic misery, every country should establish a maximum income which is a multiple of the minimum income, with that multiple being voted on (no less than every five years) by all living in the country.
Every country should establish a maximum wealth which is a multiple of the minimum wealth, with that multiple being voted on (no less than every five years) by all living in the country.
Global reparations, including sharing wealth and technological know-how between rich and poor countries, is essential for overcoming past and ongoing effects of imperialism. Establishing maximum incomes and maximum wealth possession within countries must be quickly followed by establishing such maximum levels between countries.
A core problem of current versions of the GND is that they propose to solve employment, social justice and energy problems with increased production, which is not necessary to solve any of these. Attempts to solve problems by increasing wealth feeds into the corporate culture of greed and become a barrier to creation of a New Green Culture. Increasing production beyond what is necessary increases environmental problems that threaten the Earth. It tells those who are already rich that they should grab more, more and more. It tells those who are not rich that happiness depends upon the possession of objects. The survival of Humanity depends on the building of a green culture that prizes sharing above all else.
(A webinar at 7 pm CT on May 5, 2021 on “Envisioning a Greener New Deal” will explore concerns with alternative energy, the need for global reparations and ask how to create a better world while using much less energy. Email the address of the author below for details.)
The Green New Deal has attracted perhaps the greatest attention of any proposal for decades. It would guarantee Medicare-for-All, Housing-for-All, student loan forgiveness and propose the largest economic growth in human history to address unemployment and climate change.
But the last of these hits a stumbling block. Creation of all forms of energy contributes to the destruction of nature and human life. It is possible to increase the global quality of life at the same time we reduce the use of fossil fuels and other sources of energy. Therefore, a “deep” GND would focus on energy reduction, otherwise known as energy conservation. Decreasing total energy use is a prerequisite for securing human existence.
Recognizing True Dangers
Fossil fuel (FF) dangers are well-known and include the destruction of Life via global heating. FF problems also include land grabs from indigenous peoples, farmers, and communities throughout the world as well as the poisoning of air from burning and destruction of terrestrial and aquatic life from spills. But those who focus on climate change tend to minimize very real danger of other types of energy production. A first step in developing a genuine GND is to acknowledge the destructive potential of “alternative energy” (AltE).
Nuclear power (nukes). Though dangers of nuclear disasters such as Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima are horrific, problems with the rest of its life cycle are often glossed over. Mining, milling, and transporting radioactive material to supply nukes with fuel and “dispose” of it exposes entire communities to poisoning that results in a variety of cancers. Though operation of nukes produces few greenhouse gases (GHGs), enormous quantities are released during production of steel, cement and other materials for building nuclear plants. They must be located next to water (for cooling), which means their discharge of hot water is an attack on aquatic life. Radioactive waste from nukes, kept in caskets for 30-50 years, threatens to poison humanity not for decades or centuries, but for millennia (or eternity), which makes nukes at least as dangerous as FFs. Inclusion of nuclear power as part of a GND is not the slightest bit green. The only way to address nuclear power is how to abolish it as rapidly as possible while causing the least harm to those who depend on it for energy and income.
Solar power requires manufacturing processes with chemicals which are highly toxic to those who work with them. Even before production begins, many different minerals must be mined and processed, which endangers workers and communities while destroying wildlife habitat. Additional minerals must be obtained for batteries. Once solar systems are used, they are discarded into large toxic dumps. Though few GHGs are created during use of solar panels, large amounts are created during their life cycle.
Wind power creates its own syndrome of nerve-wracking vibrations for those living next to “wind farms,” along with even larger issues with disposal of 160-foot blades. Like solar farms, wind farms undermine ecosystems where they are located. The life cycle of wind power includes toxic radioactive elements to produce circular rotation of blades.
Hydro-power from dams hurts terrestrial as well as aquatic life by altering the flow of river water. Dams undermine communities whose culture center around water and animals. Dams destroy farms. They exacerbate international conflicts when rivers flow through multiple countries, threaten the lives of construction workers, and result in collapses which can kill over 100,000 people at a time.
Several problems run through multiple AltE systems:
Despite claims of “zero emissions,” every type of AltE requires large amounts of FFs during their life cycle;
Every type of AltE is deeply intertwined with attacks on civil liberties, land grabs from indigenous communities, and/or murders of Earth defenders;
Many have cost overruns which undermine the budgets of communities tricked into financing them.
Transmission lines require additional land grabs, squashing of citizen and community rights, and increased species extinctions; and,
Since the most available resources (such as uranium for nukes, sunny land for solar arrays, mountain tops for wind farms, rivers for dams) are used first, each level of expansion requires a greater level of resource use than the previous one, which means the harvesting of AltE is increasingly harmful as time goes by.
Taking into account the extreme problems of the life cycle of every type of energy extraction leads to the following requirements for a genuine GND: Nuclear energy must be halted as quickly and as safely as possible with employment replacement. FF extraction should be dramatically reduced immediately (perhaps by 70-90% of 2020 levels) and be reduced 5-10% annually for the next 10 years thereafter. Rather than being increased, extraction for other forms of energy should be reduced (perhaps 2-5% annually).
Since honesty requires recognition that every form of energy becomes more destructive with time, the critical question for a deep GND is: “How do we reduce energy use while increasing employment and the necessities of life?”
The Naming of Things
But before exploring how to increase employment while reducing production, it is necessary to clean up some greenwashing language that has become common in recent years.
Decades ago, Barry Commoner used the phrase “linguistic detoxification” to describe the way corporations come up with a word or phrase to hide the true nature of an ecological obscenity. One of the best examples is the nuclear industry’s term “spent fuel rods” which implies that, once used, fuel rods are not radioactive, when, in fact, they are so deadly that they must be guarded for eternity. An accurate term would be “irradiated fuel rods.”
Perhaps the classic example is the way agribusiness came up with “biosolids” for renaming animal sewage sludge containing dioxin, asbestos, lead, and DDT. As John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton describe in Toxic Sludge Is Good for You (1995), industry persuaded the Environmental Protection Agency to reclassify hazardous animal waste to “Class A fertilizer” biosolids so they could be dumped on fields where food is grown.
Rather than preserving traditions of early environmentalists, many current proponents of AltE use the terms “clean” and “renewable” to describe energy which is neither. AltE is not “clean” due to the many GHG emissions throughout the life cycle of all types of energy in addition to assaults on ecosystems and human health. Though the sun, wind and river power may be eternal, products that must be mined are very much exhaustible, meaning that no form of AltE is renewable.
An honest GND would never refer to AltE as either “clean” or “renewable.” Such a GND proposal would advocate the reduction of FFs but would not suggest a goal 0% of FFs by such-and-such a date because it is unattainable. Every type of AltE requires FFs. While it may be possible to produce some steel and some cement by AltE, it is impossible to produce massive quantities of energy for the entire world with AltE. Instead, a genuine GND would explain that the only form of clean energy is less energy and specify ways to use less energy while improving the quality of life.
A genuine GND would never imply that FFs are the only source of monstrously negative effects. Privileging AltE corporations over FF corporations is stating that environmental problems will be solved by choosing one clique of capitalists over another. This means that (a) if FFs should be nationalized, then all mining, milling and manufacturing processes to produced materials needed for AltE should be nationalized; and, (b) if FFs should remain in the ground, then all components for operating nuclear plants, dams, solar facilities and wind farms should also remain in the ground.
A Shorter Work Week for All
The greatest contradiction in current versions of the GND is advocating environmental improvement while having the most massive increase in production the world has ever seen. These two goals are completely irreconcilable. A progressive GND would address this enigma via shortening the work week, which would reduce environmental damage by using less energy.
It is quite odd that versions of the GND call for Medicare-for-All, Housing-for-All, Student Loan Forgiveness-for-All; but none of them suggest a Shorter-Work-Week-for-All. The absence of this old progressive demand could be due to the incorrect neoliberal assumption that the best way to solve unemployment is via increased production.
Increased production of goods cannot create a long-term increase in employment. (It was WW II and not Roosevelt’s New Deal that consistently increased employment.) US production increased 300-fold from 1913 to 2013. If employment had increased at the same pace, everyone would be working at dozens of jobs today.
Unemployment increases from recent economic disruptions like the 2008 financial crisis and Covid in 2020 were due to the inability to shift work from some areas of the economy to others. A planned shrinking of the economy would require including the entire workforce in deciding to shift from negative to positive employment.
As the work week is reduced, every group of workers should evaluate what it does, how labor is organized, and how jobs should be redefined so that full employment is preserved. The only part of this idea which is novel is making changes democratically – job categories continuously change, with some types of work shrinking (or disappearing entirely) and other types of work expanding or coming into existence. Just as economic growth does not guarantee increases in employment, economic shrinking need not worsen unemployment if the work week is shortened.
However, a shorter work week will not accomplish environmental goals if it is accompanied by an “intensification of labor” (such as requiring workers at Amazon to handle more packages per hour or increasing class size for teachers). This means that a genuine GND requires workers’ forming strong unions which have a central role in determining what is produced as well as working conditions.
Producing According to Need Instead of According to Profit
If a core part of a GND becomes a shorter work week (without speed-up), the question naturally arises: “Will lowering the amount of production result in people going without basic necessities of life?” It is important to understand that production for profit causes the manufacture of goods that have no part of improving our lives.
Current versions of the GND are based on the neoliberal assumption that the best way to provide for necessities of life is through increased payments for purchases (ie, market economics). A progressive GND would advocate that the best way to provide the necessities of life is by guaranteeing them as human rights. This is often referred so as replacing individual wages with “social wages.” For example, the neoliberal approach to healthcare is offering medical insurance while a progressive approach is to offer medical care directly (without giving a cut to insurance companies). Likewise, a neoliberal GND would offer cash for food, housing, transportation, education and other necessities while a progressive GND would provide them directly to people. Green economics must be based on making dollar amounts less important by replacing individual wages with social wages.
Current versions of the GND seek to provide necessities by increasing the quantity of products rather than focusing on creating things that are useful, reliable and durable. A massive increase in production is an unnecessary attack on ecosystems when there is already much more production than required to provide essentials for everyone on the planet. Needs are not being met because of production which …
… is negative, including war materials, police forces and production which destroys farmland and habitat (all of which should be reduced immediately);
… is wasteful, which includes both (a) playthings of the richest 1%, and (b) things which many of us are forced to buy for survival and getting to work, the most notable being cars;
… requires unnecessary processing and transportation, the most notable example being food which is processed to lose nutritional value, packaged to absurd levels, and shipped over 1000 miles before being consumed; and,
… involves planned obsolescence, including design to fall apart or go out of style.
One important aspect of reducing production is often ignored. Each product manufactured must have a repairability index. At a minimum, criteria for the index should include (a) availability of technical documents to aid in repair, (b) ease of disassembly, (c) availability of spare parts, (d) price of spare parts, and (e) repair issues specific to the class of products. The index should become a basis for strengthening production requirements each year. A durablility index should similarly be developed and strengthened annually. Since those who do the labor of manufacturing products are more likely than owners or stockholders to attain knowledge of how to make commodities that are more reliable and durable, they must have the right to make their knowledge public without repercussions from management.
There will always be differences of opinion regarding what is needed versus what is merely desired. A progressive GND should state how those decisions would be made. A major cause of unnecessary production is that decisions concerning what to manufacture and standards for creating them are made by investors and corporate bosses rather than community residents and workers manufacturing them. A genuine GND would confront problems regarding what is produced by involving all citizens in economic decisions, and not merely the richest.
Reparations!
Perhaps the issue which is least likely to be linked to the GND is reparations to poor communities in Africa, Latin America, and Asia who have been victims of Western imperialism for 500 years. This connection forces us to ask: “Since most minerals necessary for AltE lie in poor countries, will rich countries continue to plunder their resources, exterminate what remains of indigenous cultures, force inhabitants to work for a pittance, jail and kill those who resist, destroy farmland, and leave the country a toxic wasteland for generations to come?”
For example, plans to massively expand electric vehicles (EVs) undermine the vastly more sustainable approach of urban redesign for walkable/cyclable communities. Plans would result in manufacturing EVs for the rich world while poor and working class communities would suffer from the extraction of lithium, cobalt and dozens of other materials required for these cars.
Africa may be the most mineral-rich continent. In addition to cobalt from the Democratic Republic of the Congo for EVs, Mali is the source of 75% of the uranium for French nukes, Zambia is mined for copper for AltE and hundreds of other minerals are taken from dozens of African countries.
If there are to be agreements involving corporations seeking minerals for AltE, who will those agreements be with? Will the agreements be between the ultra-rich owners of the Western empire and its puppet governments? Or, will extraction agreements be with villages and communities which will be most affected by removal of minerals for the production of energy?
Discussions of relationships between rich and poor countries make much of having “free, prior and informed consent” prior to an extraction project. Such an agreement is far from reality because (a) corporate and governmental bodies are so mired in corruption that they contaminate bodies which define and judge the meaning of “free, prior and informed,” (b) no prediction of the effects of extraction can be “informed” since it is impossible to know what the interaction of the multitude of physical, chemical, biological and ecological factors will be prior to extraction taking place, and (c) affected communities are typically bullied into accepting extraction because they fear that families will die from starvation, lack of medical care or unemployment if they do not do so. Thus, the following are essential components of a socially just GND:
Reparations which are sufficient to eliminate poverty must be paidprior to signing extraction agreements; and,
Every community must have the right toterminate an extraction agreement at any stage of the project.
This is where the other meaning of “deep” comes in. When people hear “deep green,” they often think of how industrial activity deeply affects ecosystems. “Deep” can also refer to having a deep respect for poor communities whose lives are most affected by extraction. Respect is not deep if it is unwilling to accept an answer of “No” to a request for exorbitant, profit-gouging extraction. Peoples across the world may decide that since they have received so little for so long, it may be time for rich countries to share the wealth they have stolen and dig up new wealth much, much more slowly.
A New Green Culture
Just to make sure that it is clear and not forgotten, the fundamental question regarding extraction of material needed for AltE is: “Will rich countries continue to plunder minerals underneath or adjacent to poor communities at a rate that corporations decide? Will they expect poor communities to be satisfied with a vague promise that, for the very first time, great things will happen after the plundering? Or should reparations be fully paid for past and current plundering, with poor communities deciding how much extraction they will allow and at what speed?”
Essential for building a New Green World is the creation of a New Green Culture which asks all of the billions of people on the planet to share their ideas for obtaining the necessities of life while using less energy. Such a culture would aim for one idea to spark to many ideas, all of which strive more toward living together than on inventing energy-guzzling gadgets.
In order to build a New Green Culture which puts the sharing of wealth above personal greed, several things that must happen:
To bring billions of people out of economic misery, every country should establish a maximum income which is a multiple of the minimum income, with that multiple being voted on (no less than every five years) by all living in the country.
Every country should establish a maximum wealth which is a multiple of the minimum wealth, with that multiple being voted on (no less than every five years) by all living in the country.
Global reparations, including sharing wealth and technological know-how between rich and poor countries, is essential for overcoming past and ongoing effects of imperialism. Establishing maximum incomes and maximum wealth possession within countries must be quickly followed by establishing such maximum levels between countries.
A core problem of current versions of the GND is that they propose to solve employment, social justice and energy problems with increased production, which is not necessary to solve any of these. Attempts to solve problems by increasing wealth feeds into the corporate culture of greed and become a barrier to creation of a New Green Culture. Increasing production beyond what is necessary increases environmental problems that threaten the Earth. It tells those who are already rich that they should grab more, more and more. It tells those who are not rich that happiness depends upon the possession of objects. The survival of Humanity depends on the building of a green culture that prizes sharing above all else.
(A webinar at 7 pm CT on May 5, 2021 on “Envisioning a Greener New Deal” will explore concerns with alternative energy, the need for global reparations and ask how to create a better world while using much less energy. Email the address of the author below for details.)
This is a version of a speech given outside the headquarters of ReconAfrica in Vancouver BC on Water Day — March 22, 2021.
We are on stolen CSḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), Stó:lō and Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh) and xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam) land and what is happening here today, the assault of Indigenous peoples and the invasion of their territories by Canada, its corporations and economic elites is also happening to the San people in Southern Africa. In a recent petition by activists we have learned that: “ReconAfrica has been given permission to drill for fossil fuels in the Kavango basin between Namibia and Botswana and the Kalahari Desert extending to the south eastern banks of the Okavango River and Delta. This area includes numerous areas of international significance, but for the San indigenous people who live there this is their sacred and ancestral ‘homeland’. The San people are the rightful current inhabitants and have been the custodians of this land for thousands of years. They have never been consulted, nor have they given their consent to any entities to prospect for oil and gas in their lands. By pursuing oil and gas development in the are the governments of Botswana and Namibia, and the Southern African region contravene their commitments to various international declarations an agreements as well as their own national laws. The oil and gas drilling operations will ruin roads, damage Indigenous livelihoods, deplete water resources and negatively impact biodiversity within the precious region. The Kavango Basin, which includes the Okavango Delta, lies beneath one of Africa’s most biodiverse habitats. It is home to a myriad of bird and megafauna species—including the largest herd of African elephants and African wild do populations—as well as many other threatened and endangered species. Potential impacts to local people and ecosystems include: massive water resource depletion, human induced earthquakes, disruption of avian species communication, breeding and nesting.”
Sounds familiar? This is because it is.
San hunter-gatherers walking across the Kalahari Desert in southern Africa. (Courtesy of L.K. Marshall and L.J. Marshall. Copyright President and Fellows of Harvard College, Peabody Museum #2001.29.390.)
The struggles of the San people connect with the struggles of Indigenous peoples here in settler Canada. We should remember that despite the fact that we are separated by different colonial contexts and most importantly by continents and oceans the history of colonization in the two continents is very similar even though the trajectories are different; and what happens here also happens there. Because in a globalized world we are all interconnected and what we do here has a violent impact there. As Ina-Maria Shikongo, a climate activist from Namibia states: “The problem with this whole deal is we can really see what is happening all around the globe, it is a total take over of the oil industries of the last reserves of the green spaces that we have. They don’t care about the people, the animals, nothing! They just care about the money. We can all see that the weather patterns are changing drastically and we are still talking about digging up fossil fuels when we should stop.”
ReconAfrica is a Canadian-US corporation whose headquarters are based here in so-called Vancouver, that is on stolen land. And I can’t help it but notice the irony that this Canadian company on stolen land is set to seize the land of the San people in Southern Africa. The theft might affect different peoples but bears the same racist and colonial violence. The theft follows the same patterns of white supremacy and environmental racism that has devastated First Peoples and their sacred territories around the globe.
ReconAfrica does not come out of the blue. It continues the early legacies of racist colonialism and racial capitalism, systems that are 500 years old but have now mutated into resource capitalism spurred by oil and gas corporations and new forms of land grabs. The very country this company operates from, (Canada), is itself a petro-state, that often behaves as a corporation and has a violent and non-consensual relationship with its own Indigenous peoples. Canada consistently props up the mining and fossil fuel industries and together state and industry break treaties, invade Indigenous territories without their consent and often with the help of militarized police and the criminal justice system, pillage their lands, criminalize land defenders and throw them in prisons. By displacing them from their land, Canada and its corporations systematically destroy their cultural and food systems and subject Indigenous communities into abject poverty, homelessness, and food and water insecurity, all in the name of profit. Canadian companies either wreck the homes of Indigenous peoples here domestically or the homes of First Peoples there, internationally. The game and the pattern are the same: there is no corner of the earth and no people that resource capitalism will not ravage.
Let there be no mistake: ReconAfrica is an extension of the colonial project that began in Europe 500 years ago and has morphed today into local and global extractivism. Since the emergence of capitalism in the 16th century European extractivism intensified and ran rampant during colonialism through the extraction of materials such as minerals, gold, silver, timber, furs, fish an so on. Naomi Klein tells us that before Canada became a nation it was an extractivist company, the Hudson Bay Company trafficking in furs, and pelts. Recon’s greed for oil follows in the footsteps of the Hudson Bay Company. Through Recon the Canadian model of unbridled extraction and devastation of ancestral Indigenous land and livelihoods is being now exported from this continent to the African continent and the ransacking of its First Peoples, the San people.
And like the Hudson Bay Company, ReconAfrica is genocidal: it is a symptom of toxic colonial land grabs that some commentators link to the industrial genocide of Indigenous peoples. Original peoples across the globe have experienced genocide since the moment the European colonizers arrived uninvited on their territories. By pillaging their land, reducing it to commodities whose goal was to flow into and eventually industrialize Europe, the violent eviction and systematic extermination of Indigenous peoples became the very foundation of the wealth of Europe and settler states such as Canada. Indigenous peoples not only lost their land and thus their sustenance, and their livelihoods, they impoverished, relocated into reserves, starved, and their children were abducted, abused and experimented upon in residential schools to be assimilated in settler society and their cultures to be ethnically cleansed. Their communities are still experiencing profound poverty, higher rates of incarceration, addiction and suicide, and lack of fundamental human rights such as access to health, education and clean drinking water. As Jason Hickel has forcefully claimed in The Dividethe Western world including Canada are the developed and industrialized First World that they are today because they have methodically and brutally de-industrialized and underdevelop the rest of the world.
In other words, their industry and wealth are not some sign of good luck or ingenuity or innovation owed to European and Western superior genes of civilization; rather it was built on the violence of colonialism and stolen from Indigenous peoples. Western industrial “progress” has been made on the backs of First peoples and what is happening today to the San people is an iteration of that earlier colonial and genocidal project. It is fair to say that the economic prosperity of Canada and its corporations depends on the racist violence that is about to be inflicted onto the San people. And it is also fair to say that ReconAfrica’s money is nothing but blood money. And it is also fair to say that some prosper on the death of others and the destruction of their homes. And it is also fair to say that our energy greed is built on the devastation of people, lives, homes, ecosystems, the planet. I don’t know what you call Recon but to me they sound like parasites and scavengers of lives in pursuit of profit.
In fact, ReconAfrica is guilty of environmental injustice that is racist, white supremacist and colonial. In “Let Them Drown: The Violence of Othering in a Warming World,” Naomi Klein argues that environmental injustice is also directly connected to environmental racism through the process of othering of sacrificial and disposable people. For ReconAfrica and the political and local elites of Namibia and Botswana the San people are not people but just obstacles to their drilling goals and so called economic development of these countries. Their land and entire rich ecosystems are simply impediments and the groundwater, the aquifiers, the endangered species are nothing but hindrance to the oil and gas that lie beneath.
Recon and economic elites have so dehumanized and othered the San people and their land that they do not count and therefore they can be removed or poisoned, or pillaged or destroyed. Who cares if the groundwater is contaminated through the drilling and mining operations? Who cares if this impacts the health and food security of the San people? Economic development and profit matter more than Indigenous peoples’ lives. As Klein further reminds us othering is also directly connected to notions of racial and civilizational superiority because in order to have other and disposable people you need to have people and cultures that they count so little for their exploiters that they deserve sacrifice for the ever expanding energy needs of the Global North. And in contrast, you need to have people that see themselves as superior, as uniquely human and thus deserving of having it all, excessive lifestyles at the expense of those other thought of as subhuman.
Our economic elites think of our culture as superior because we are developed; we arrogantly call ourselves the “developed world,” and we call the cultures we ravage and dehumanize “underdeveloped,” “not yet advanced,” “primitive savages” that just sit on oil and precious metals used for our laptops and electronic devices. And we arrogantly think that all we need to do is remove them to get to that black gold. In the early colonization of the so-called Americas, Indigenous peoples often were completely shocked to see the deranged behaviour of the Spaniards lusting after gold. And there is an urban legend that tells the story of how some Original peoples of this continent thought of gold as the “excrement of the devil.” Who would have thought that Recon continues the legacy of the Spanish conquistadores in its frenzied greed after the excrement of the devil we now call black gold, oil.
Klein also cautions us that toxic colonialism justifies the sacrifice of people and dispossession of land through virulent intellectual theories that Western culture has harnessed to legitimize their destruction. Colonialism has always been aided by scientific racism and its cousin, Social Darwinism, theories that are fraught with racist ideas about the superiority of Northern races destined to rule weak Southern races economically, politically, culturally. Again we might want to remember that we call Northern cultures “developed” and Southern cultures “under- or un- developed.” And we keep saying to ourselves the patronizing and self-serving myth: “They do not know their own good, they can’t understand the wealth they sit on and if only they let us develop them. This is also called the “White man’s burden” that the Northern nations have to bring civilization in the form of economic prosperity to Southern peoples living in the dark ages. We are the advance and they are the barbaric.
But my friends, I know of no other barbarism than the one Western economic elites inflict in devastating the home of First peoples, driving the climate crisis and destroying the planet. The eviction of the San people is a barbarity and those who do it are the barbarians and the savages. The climate crisis is a barbarity, not progress, and certainly not civilization. The collapse of the planet is a barbarity and those who are responsible for it are criminal and genocidal. Our economic institutions, our corporations and our economic elites are driving us all to destruction; not development. They are a threat to all Indigenous peoples across the globe and the existential annihilation of all life on this planet. I call them profiteers of death.
What is happening in the Kavango basin is not just outright racism. It is also the story of commodity frontiers and capitalist expansion and is an extension of the colonial principle of the “doctrine of discovery” or in the words of some commentators “the doctrine of Native genocide.” You may know that when Europeans arrived here they thought of it as empty land that they had just discovered. Of course, what is really arrogant and foolish about it is that “you can’t discover something that is already the home of Indigenous peoples living here.” For Europeans the doctrine of “Discovery” served to remove the Original people to settle on their land, commodify it, exploit it and eventually degrade it, cut down its forests, toxify its watersheds, poison the soil, overfish it, kill its buffalo, endanger and eclipse multiple species. Here in so-called British Columbia, settler culture is wiping out the salmon along with countless plant and non-human animals. But I’m digressing. The doctrine of discovery serves the capitalist desire for a never ending expansion and growth. As land is being exhausted in one place and its peoples are driven out, “new” land needs to be “discovered and thus occupied.”
Today the global capitalist economy and financial markets of which Recon is a symptom continue to “discover new land” to grab. They might not call these “discovered territories” but they have invented highly elaborate euphemisms that mean exactly the same thing. They now call “discovered land” “new market opportunities” or “land investments” or “economic development.” We must see these new terms for what they are: “the emperor has no clothes” because the naked truth is that the global empire we call capitalism continues to treat the entire world as a frontier of conquest and terra nullius, or empty land to satisfy larger economic interests that are specifically located in the Global North. And that entails genocide of traditional peoples that live on those lands.
The truth of the matter is that African countries since colonization were “discovered” by European powers only to be harnessed to the global economy and serve as the economic satellites of the Global North. African countries have always been used as exporters of raw materials including human enslaved labour to Europe and later its colonies and even later what we call the Global North. In parallel, African nations have been importers of manufactured products from the North. This condensed history of unequal economic relationships mired in brutal exploitation must not also omit the violent legacy of the slave trade in which millions of Africans were abducted from their ancestral homelands to work in what is euphemistically called plantations—but were actual death camps—in the American continent and industrialize its economy. And there we have it again: the enslavement of humans that gave rise to the economic prosperity of this continent is not separate from the enslavement of land and nature through the extraction of energy and raw materials for the enrichment of corporate elites in the Global North.
African American scholar, Cedric Robinson calls this phenomenon racial capitalism. This is an economic system that on the one hand was built on the exploitation of the free labour of African people who were once Indigenous to the African continent; and on the other racial capitalism thrives on the genocide of First peoples in the American continent that are displaced from their ancestral homelands. Racial capitalism is also a system that treats the world as a storehouse of endless commodities or commodity frontier ever expanding to amass more land. As Robinson suggests, capitalism “emerged within the European feudal order and flowered in the cultural soil of a Western civilization already thoroughly infused with racialism and racial hierarchies about superior people and inferior others whose land and labour can therefore be exploited. Capitalism and racism, in other words, did not break from the old order but rather evolved from it to produce a modern world system of racial capitalism dependent on slavery, violence, imperialism, and Indigenous genocide.” Within this context, we can clearly see how ReconAfrica is a symptom of a larger disease: that of racial capitalism.
Let there be no mistake: when you treat the world and its Original Peoples as a frontier of conquest you establish with the earth an exploitative relationship based on ever expanding places to commodify and people to remove or enslave. And when that place is exhausted and its populations ethically cleansed the search begins again for another place, another frontier and another people to dispossess so long that your degradation of the “new” land and your crimes against the communities you displace remain invisible to energy consumers in the Global North. Out of sight, out of mind, none of us need to worry where did this energy or coltan for our electronic devices came from.
We see the logic of the frontier of conquest not just in the Kavango basin but here closer to home and the way domestic companies including the Crown corporation of TMX and foreign corporations have been stealing Indigenous land, breaking their treaties, dispossessing them from their territories, and fuelling the climate crisis, we are all subjected to today.
Windigo by Norval Morrisseau
Ojibwe activist and scholar Winona LaDuke calls this form of greed the Windigo disease: In Anishinaabe tradition understanding the need to avoid a culture of commodification, domination, exploitation, greed, consumption, and destruction of the planet is guided by the Windigo teachings. The Windigo is a cannibalistic being that is cursed with an overwhelming hunger that can never be satisfied, no matter how much it consumes. The Windigo wanders the Earth, destroys whatever it finds in its path, in an agonizing and unending quest for satisfaction, an unending quest for more land to pillage and more people to destroy in the name of profit and greed. ReconAfrica is Windigo. TMX is Windigo. Coastal Gas Link is Windigo. Line 3 is Windigo. Barrick Gold is Windigo. Enbridge is Windigo. Imperial Metals is Windigo. Anvil Mining Limited is Windigo. Suncor is Windigo. Teck Resources is Windigo. Canada and its extractivist economy are Windigo.
While Indigenous peoples across the globe have been treating the land as our sacred home corporations such as Recon have been treating it as a frontier of conquest. Unfortunately, we are running against severe ecological limits: this is called climate crisis and the collapse of living ecosystems as well as the extermination of Indigenous peoples across the world.
We denounce ReconAfrica and its crimes against the San people and the land. We denounce Recon’s environmental racism. We denounce the Canadian government’s complicity in allowing this company to exploit and potentially destroy million acres of the Kalahari Desert. We will resist along the San people who are the rightful custodians of their land against the Windigo disease called ReconAfrica. We will remain unwaveringly committed to Indigenous peoples in Turtle Island and their fierce resistance that began 500 years ago and still continues strong till they slain all the snakes of pipelines, and the Windigo of corporate greed in this continent and defend their land.
This is a version of a speech given outside the headquarters of ReconAfrica in Vancouver BC on Water Day — March 22, 2021.
We are on stolen CSḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), Stó:lō and Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh) and xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam) land and what is happening here today, the assault of Indigenous peoples and the invasion of their territories by Canada, its corporations and economic elites is also happening to the San people in Southern Africa. In a recent petition by activists we have learned that: “ReconAfrica has been given permission to drill for fossil fuels in the Kavango basin between Namibia and Botswana and the Kalahari Desert extending to the south eastern banks of the Okavango River and Delta. This area includes numerous areas of international significance, but for the San indigenous people who live there this is their sacred and ancestral ‘homeland’. The San people are the rightful current inhabitants and have been the custodians of this land for thousands of years. They have never been consulted, nor have they given their consent to any entities to prospect for oil and gas in their lands. By pursuing oil and gas development in the are the governments of Botswana and Namibia, and the Southern African region contravene their commitments to various international declarations an agreements as well as their own national laws. The oil and gas drilling operations will ruin roads, damage Indigenous livelihoods, deplete water resources and negatively impact biodiversity within the precious region. The Kavango Basin, which includes the Okavango Delta, lies beneath one of Africa’s most biodiverse habitats. It is home to a myriad of bird and megafauna species—including the largest herd of African elephants and African wild do populations—as well as many other threatened and endangered species. Potential impacts to local people and ecosystems include: massive water resource depletion, human induced earthquakes, disruption of avian species communication, breeding and nesting.”
Sounds familiar? This is because it is.
San hunter-gatherers walking across the Kalahari Desert in southern Africa. (Courtesy of L.K. Marshall and L.J. Marshall. Copyright President and Fellows of Harvard College, Peabody Museum #2001.29.390.)
The struggles of the San people connect with the struggles of Indigenous peoples here in settler Canada. We should remember that despite the fact that we are separated by different colonial contexts and most importantly by continents and oceans the history of colonization in the two continents is very similar even though the trajectories are different; and what happens here also happens there. Because in a globalized world we are all interconnected and what we do here has a violent impact there. As Ina-Maria Shikongo, a climate activist from Namibia states: “The problem with this whole deal is we can really see what is happening all around the globe, it is a total take over of the oil industries of the last reserves of the green spaces that we have. They don’t care about the people, the animals, nothing! They just care about the money. We can all see that the weather patterns are changing drastically and we are still talking about digging up fossil fuels when we should stop.”
ReconAfrica is a Canadian-US corporation whose headquarters are based here in so-called Vancouver, that is on stolen land. And I can’t help it but notice the irony that this Canadian company on stolen land is set to seize the land of the San people in Southern Africa. The theft might affect different peoples but bears the same racist and colonial violence. The theft follows the same patterns of white supremacy and environmental racism that has devastated First Peoples and their sacred territories around the globe.
ReconAfrica does not come out of the blue. It continues the early legacies of racist colonialism and racial capitalism, systems that are 500 years old but have now mutated into resource capitalism spurred by oil and gas corporations and new forms of land grabs. The very country this company operates from, (Canada), is itself a petro-state, that often behaves as a corporation and has a violent and non-consensual relationship with its own Indigenous peoples. Canada consistently props up the mining and fossil fuel industries and together state and industry break treaties, invade Indigenous territories without their consent and often with the help of militarized police and the criminal justice system, pillage their lands, criminalize land defenders and throw them in prisons. By displacing them from their land, Canada and its corporations systematically destroy their cultural and food systems and subject Indigenous communities into abject poverty, homelessness, and food and water insecurity, all in the name of profit. Canadian companies either wreck the homes of Indigenous peoples here domestically or the homes of First Peoples there, internationally. The game and the pattern are the same: there is no corner of the earth and no people that resource capitalism will not ravage.
Let there be no mistake: ReconAfrica is an extension of the colonial project that began in Europe 500 years ago and has morphed today into local and global extractivism. Since the emergence of capitalism in the 16th century European extractivism intensified and ran rampant during colonialism through the extraction of materials such as minerals, gold, silver, timber, furs, fish an so on. Naomi Klein tells us that before Canada became a nation it was an extractivist company, the Hudson Bay Company trafficking in furs, and pelts. Recon’s greed for oil follows in the footsteps of the Hudson Bay Company. Through Recon the Canadian model of unbridled extraction and devastation of ancestral Indigenous land and livelihoods is being now exported from this continent to the African continent and the ransacking of its First Peoples, the San people.
And like the Hudson Bay Company, ReconAfrica is genocidal: it is a symptom of toxic colonial land grabs that some commentators link to the industrial genocide of Indigenous peoples. Original peoples across the globe have experienced genocide since the moment the European colonizers arrived uninvited on their territories. By pillaging their land, reducing it to commodities whose goal was to flow into and eventually industrialize Europe, the violent eviction and systematic extermination of Indigenous peoples became the very foundation of the wealth of Europe and settler states such as Canada. Indigenous peoples not only lost their land and thus their sustenance, and their livelihoods, they impoverished, relocated into reserves, starved, and their children were abducted, abused and experimented upon in residential schools to be assimilated in settler society and their cultures to be ethnically cleansed. Their communities are still experiencing profound poverty, higher rates of incarceration, addiction and suicide, and lack of fundamental human rights such as access to health, education and clean drinking water. As Jason Hickel has forcefully claimed in The Dividethe Western world including Canada are the developed and industrialized First World that they are today because they have methodically and brutally de-industrialized and underdevelop the rest of the world.
In other words, their industry and wealth are not some sign of good luck or ingenuity or innovation owed to European and Western superior genes of civilization; rather it was built on the violence of colonialism and stolen from Indigenous peoples. Western industrial “progress” has been made on the backs of First peoples and what is happening today to the San people is an iteration of that earlier colonial and genocidal project. It is fair to say that the economic prosperity of Canada and its corporations depends on the racist violence that is about to be inflicted onto the San people. And it is also fair to say that ReconAfrica’s money is nothing but blood money. And it is also fair to say that some prosper on the death of others and the destruction of their homes. And it is also fair to say that our energy greed is built on the devastation of people, lives, homes, ecosystems, the planet. I don’t know what you call Recon but to me they sound like parasites and scavengers of lives in pursuit of profit.
In fact, ReconAfrica is guilty of environmental injustice that is racist, white supremacist and colonial. In “Let Them Drown: The Violence of Othering in a Warming World,” Naomi Klein argues that environmental injustice is also directly connected to environmental racism through the process of othering of sacrificial and disposable people. For ReconAfrica and the political and local elites of Namibia and Botswana the San people are not people but just obstacles to their drilling goals and so called economic development of these countries. Their land and entire rich ecosystems are simply impediments and the groundwater, the aquifiers, the endangered species are nothing but hindrance to the oil and gas that lie beneath.
Recon and economic elites have so dehumanized and othered the San people and their land that they do not count and therefore they can be removed or poisoned, or pillaged or destroyed. Who cares if the groundwater is contaminated through the drilling and mining operations? Who cares if this impacts the health and food security of the San people? Economic development and profit matter more than Indigenous peoples’ lives. As Klein further reminds us othering is also directly connected to notions of racial and civilizational superiority because in order to have other and disposable people you need to have people and cultures that they count so little for their exploiters that they deserve sacrifice for the ever expanding energy needs of the Global North. And in contrast, you need to have people that see themselves as superior, as uniquely human and thus deserving of having it all, excessive lifestyles at the expense of those other thought of as subhuman.
Our economic elites think of our culture as superior because we are developed; we arrogantly call ourselves the “developed world,” and we call the cultures we ravage and dehumanize “underdeveloped,” “not yet advanced,” “primitive savages” that just sit on oil and precious metals used for our laptops and electronic devices. And we arrogantly think that all we need to do is remove them to get to that black gold. In the early colonization of the so-called Americas, Indigenous peoples often were completely shocked to see the deranged behaviour of the Spaniards lusting after gold. And there is an urban legend that tells the story of how some Original peoples of this continent thought of gold as the “excrement of the devil.” Who would have thought that Recon continues the legacy of the Spanish conquistadores in its frenzied greed after the excrement of the devil we now call black gold, oil.
Klein also cautions us that toxic colonialism justifies the sacrifice of people and dispossession of land through virulent intellectual theories that Western culture has harnessed to legitimize their destruction. Colonialism has always been aided by scientific racism and its cousin, Social Darwinism, theories that are fraught with racist ideas about the superiority of Northern races destined to rule weak Southern races economically, politically, culturally. Again we might want to remember that we call Northern cultures “developed” and Southern cultures “under- or un- developed.” And we keep saying to ourselves the patronizing and self-serving myth: “They do not know their own good, they can’t understand the wealth they sit on and if only they let us develop them. This is also called the “White man’s burden” that the Northern nations have to bring civilization in the form of economic prosperity to Southern peoples living in the dark ages. We are the advance and they are the barbaric.
But my friends, I know of no other barbarism than the one Western economic elites inflict in devastating the home of First peoples, driving the climate crisis and destroying the planet. The eviction of the San people is a barbarity and those who do it are the barbarians and the savages. The climate crisis is a barbarity, not progress, and certainly not civilization. The collapse of the planet is a barbarity and those who are responsible for it are criminal and genocidal. Our economic institutions, our corporations and our economic elites are driving us all to destruction; not development. They are a threat to all Indigenous peoples across the globe and the existential annihilation of all life on this planet. I call them profiteers of death.
What is happening in the Kavango basin is not just outright racism. It is also the story of commodity frontiers and capitalist expansion and is an extension of the colonial principle of the “doctrine of discovery” or in the words of some commentators “the doctrine of Native genocide.” You may know that when Europeans arrived here they thought of it as empty land that they had just discovered. Of course, what is really arrogant and foolish about it is that “you can’t discover something that is already the home of Indigenous peoples living here.” For Europeans the doctrine of “Discovery” served to remove the Original people to settle on their land, commodify it, exploit it and eventually degrade it, cut down its forests, toxify its watersheds, poison the soil, overfish it, kill its buffalo, endanger and eclipse multiple species. Here in so-called British Columbia, settler culture is wiping out the salmon along with countless plant and non-human animals. But I’m digressing. The doctrine of discovery serves the capitalist desire for a never ending expansion and growth. As land is being exhausted in one place and its peoples are driven out, “new” land needs to be “discovered and thus occupied.”
Today the global capitalist economy and financial markets of which Recon is a symptom continue to “discover new land” to grab. They might not call these “discovered territories” but they have invented highly elaborate euphemisms that mean exactly the same thing. They now call “discovered land” “new market opportunities” or “land investments” or “economic development.” We must see these new terms for what they are: “the emperor has no clothes” because the naked truth is that the global empire we call capitalism continues to treat the entire world as a frontier of conquest and terra nullius, or empty land to satisfy larger economic interests that are specifically located in the Global North. And that entails genocide of traditional peoples that live on those lands.
The truth of the matter is that African countries since colonization were “discovered” by European powers only to be harnessed to the global economy and serve as the economic satellites of the Global North. African countries have always been used as exporters of raw materials including human enslaved labour to Europe and later its colonies and even later what we call the Global North. In parallel, African nations have been importers of manufactured products from the North. This condensed history of unequal economic relationships mired in brutal exploitation must not also omit the violent legacy of the slave trade in which millions of Africans were abducted from their ancestral homelands to work in what is euphemistically called plantations—but were actual death camps—in the American continent and industrialize its economy. And there we have it again: the enslavement of humans that gave rise to the economic prosperity of this continent is not separate from the enslavement of land and nature through the extraction of energy and raw materials for the enrichment of corporate elites in the Global North.
African American scholar, Cedric Robinson calls this phenomenon racial capitalism. This is an economic system that on the one hand was built on the exploitation of the free labour of African people who were once Indigenous to the African continent; and on the other racial capitalism thrives on the genocide of First peoples in the American continent that are displaced from their ancestral homelands. Racial capitalism is also a system that treats the world as a storehouse of endless commodities or commodity frontier ever expanding to amass more land. As Robinson suggests, capitalism “emerged within the European feudal order and flowered in the cultural soil of a Western civilization already thoroughly infused with racialism and racial hierarchies about superior people and inferior others whose land and labour can therefore be exploited. Capitalism and racism, in other words, did not break from the old order but rather evolved from it to produce a modern world system of racial capitalism dependent on slavery, violence, imperialism, and Indigenous genocide.” Within this context, we can clearly see how ReconAfrica is a symptom of a larger disease: that of racial capitalism.
Let there be no mistake: when you treat the world and its Original Peoples as a frontier of conquest you establish with the earth an exploitative relationship based on ever expanding places to commodify and people to remove or enslave. And when that place is exhausted and its populations ethically cleansed the search begins again for another place, another frontier and another people to dispossess so long that your degradation of the “new” land and your crimes against the communities you displace remain invisible to energy consumers in the Global North. Out of sight, out of mind, none of us need to worry where did this energy or coltan for our electronic devices came from.
We see the logic of the frontier of conquest not just in the Kavango basin but here closer to home and the way domestic companies including the Crown corporation of TMX and foreign corporations have been stealing Indigenous land, breaking their treaties, dispossessing them from their territories, and fuelling the climate crisis, we are all subjected to today.
Windigo by Norval Morrisseau
Ojibwe activist and scholar Winona LaDuke calls this form of greed the Windigo disease: In Anishinaabe tradition understanding the need to avoid a culture of commodification, domination, exploitation, greed, consumption, and destruction of the planet is guided by the Windigo teachings. The Windigo is a cannibalistic being that is cursed with an overwhelming hunger that can never be satisfied, no matter how much it consumes. The Windigo wanders the Earth, destroys whatever it finds in its path, in an agonizing and unending quest for satisfaction, an unending quest for more land to pillage and more people to destroy in the name of profit and greed. ReconAfrica is Windigo. TMX is Windigo. Coastal Gas Link is Windigo. Line 3 is Windigo. Barrick Gold is Windigo. Enbridge is Windigo. Imperial Metals is Windigo. Anvil Mining Limited is Windigo. Suncor is Windigo. Teck Resources is Windigo. Canada and its extractivist economy are Windigo.
While Indigenous peoples across the globe have been treating the land as our sacred home corporations such as Recon have been treating it as a frontier of conquest. Unfortunately, we are running against severe ecological limits: this is called climate crisis and the collapse of living ecosystems as well as the extermination of Indigenous peoples across the world.
We denounce ReconAfrica and its crimes against the San people and the land. We denounce Recon’s environmental racism. We denounce the Canadian government’s complicity in allowing this company to exploit and potentially destroy million acres of the Kalahari Desert. We will resist along the San people who are the rightful custodians of their land against the Windigo disease called ReconAfrica. We will remain unwaveringly committed to Indigenous peoples in Turtle Island and their fierce resistance that began 500 years ago and still continues strong till they slain all the snakes of pipelines, and the Windigo of corporate greed in this continent and defend their land.
Litsa Chatzivasileiou is a sessional instructor at the Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality, and Social Justice at the University of British Columbia and teaches critical race, Indigenous, diaspora and gender studies. Read other articles by Litsa.
Need an idea for a side hustle? Put sanctions on a country, pirate its oil exports, then sell it! That’s what the US did with a million barrels of Iranian oil.
Need an idea for a side hustle? Put sanctions on a country, pirate its oil exports, then sell it! That’s what the US did with a million barrels of Iranian oil.
Oswaldo Terreros (Ecuador), Mural para la Universidad Superior de las Artes (‘Mural for the University of the Arts’), 2012.
In 2019, 613 million Indians voted to appoint their representatives to the Indian parliament (Lok Sabha). During the election campaign, the political parties spent Rs. 60,000 crores (around US $8 billion), 45% of which was spent by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the governing party; the BJP won 37% of the vote, which translated into 303 of the 545 seats in the Lok Sabha. A year later, a massive $14 billion was spent on the US presidential and congressional elections, with the winning Democrat Party dominating the spending. These are massive amounts of money, whose grip on the democratic process is quite clear by now. Is it possible to talk about ‘democracy’ without being candid about the erosion of the democratic spirit by this avalanche of money?
Money floods the system, eats into the loyalties of politicians, corrupts the institutions of civil society, and shapes the narratives of the media. It matters that the dominant classes in our world own the main communications outlets and that these outlets shape the way people decipher the world around us. Although the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights affirms that ‘Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression’ (Article 19), the plain fact is that the concentration of the media in the hands of a few corporate entities circumscribes the freedom to ‘impart information and ideas through any media’. For this reason, Reporters Without Borders has an ongoing Media Ownership Monitor that traces the consolidation of the media held by corporate power, which in turn drives a political agenda within existing systems of government.
Paul Guiragossian (Lebanon), La Lutte de l’Existence (‘The Struggle of Existence’), 1988
Aijaz Ahmad, Senior Fellow at Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, argues that extreme right political projects find it possible to drive their agenda through democratic institutions, since the political structures in these countries – from the United States to India – have seen a considerable erosion of their democratic content. As Ahmad explains, the extreme right in countries such as the United States and India does not challenge the constitutional, liberal democratic form, but garrottes formal institutions by transforming society ‘in all domains of culture, religion, and civilisation’.
In Latin America, the extreme right has used every weapon to delegitimise its adversaries, including using perfectly good laws against corruption in a malicious way to target leaders of the left. This is a strategy called ‘lawfare’, where the law is used – often without evidence – to oust democratically-elected leaders of the left or to prevent them from running for office. Lawfare was used to remove Honduran president José Manuel Zelaya in 2009, Paraguayan president Fernando Lugo in 2012, and Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff in 2016; these leaders were all victims of judicial coup d’états. Brazil’s former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva was denied the right to run for the presidency in 2018 by a lawsuit of no merit whatsoever amidst predictions in all polls that he would win. Argentina’s former president Cristina Fernández de Kirchner faced a series of cases beginning in 2016, all of which prevented her from running again in 2019 (she is now the vice president, a testament to her popularity in the country).
Emiliano di Cavalcanti (Brazil), Sonhos do carnaval (‘Dreams of Carnaval’), 1955.
In Ecuador, the oligarchy used the techniques of the guerra jurídica (‘legal war’) to delegitimise the entire left, especially former president Rafael Correa (2007-2017). Correa was accused of bribery – with the bizarre notion of ‘psychic influence’ (influjo psíquico) at the root of the case. He was handed down an eight-year sentence which prevented him from running for office in Ecuador.
Why was Correa anathema to both Ecuador’s dominant class and to the United States? The Citizens’ Revolution that Correa led passed a progressive constitution in 2008, which put the principle of ‘good living’ (buen vivir in Spanish and sumak kawsay in Quechua) at its heart. Government investment to strengthen social and economic rights came alongside a crackdown on corporate (including multinational) corruption. Oil revenue was not parked in foreign banks, but used to invest in education, health care, roads, and other basic infrastructure. From Ecuador’s population of 17 million, nearly 2 million people were lifted out of poverty in the Correa years.
Correa’s government was an aberration to the multinational firms – such as the US-based oil company Chevron – and to the Ecuadorian oligarchy. Chevron’s dangerous case for compensation against Ecuador, brought forward before Correa took office, was nonetheless fiercely resisted by Correa’s government. The Dirty Hand (Mano Negra) campaign put enormous international pressure against Chevron, which worked closely with the US embassy in Quito and the US government to undermine Correa and his campaign against the oil giant.
Legendary musician Roger Waters talks to me about Chevron’s mischief in Ecuador
Not only did they want Correa out, but they wanted all the leftists – called Correistas by shorthand – out as well. Lenín Moreno, who was once close to Correa, ascended to the presidency in 2017, switched sides, became the main instrument for fragmenting the Ecuadorian left, and delivered Ecuador back to its elites and to the United States. Moreno’s government gutted the public sector by defunding education and health care, withdrawing labour and housing rights, attempting to sell off Ecuador’s refinery, and deregulating parts of the financial system. Collapsed oil prices that led to cuts in oil subsidies, a hefty loan from the International Monetary Fund at the cost of austerity measures, and mismanagement of the pandemic battered Moreno’s legitimacy. A consequence of these policies has been Ecuador’s appalling response to the pandemic, which includes accusations of the deliberate undercounting of as many as 20,000 COVID-19 deaths.
Firoz Mahmud (Bangladesh), Ouponibeshik/Porouponibeshik (‘Colonial/Postcolonial’), 2017.
To ingratiate himself to the United States, Moreno ejected WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange from Ecuador’s London embassy, arrested computer programmer and privacy activist Ola Bini on a concocted case, and launched a frontal attack against the Correistas. The political organisation of the Correistas was broken up, its leaders arrested, and any attempt to regroup for elections denied. Once such as example is the Social Compromise Force or Fuerza Compromiso Social platform, which the Correistas used to run for local elections in 2019; this platform was then banned in 2020. A February 2018 referendum was barrelled through the country, allowing the government to destroy the democratic structures of the National Electoral Council (CNE), the Constitutional Court, the Supreme Court, the Judiciary Council, the attorney general, the comptroller general, and others. Democracy was hollowed out.
A month before the 7 February 2021 presidential election, it appeared clear that in a fair election the candidate of the left, Andrés Arauz Galarza, would prevail. A range of pollsters suggested that Arauz would win in the first round with over the threshold of 40%. Arauz (age 35) is an attractive candidate with not a whiff of corruption or incompetence around him for his decade of service in the Central Bank and as a minister in the last two turbulent years of Correa’s government. When Correa left office, Arauz went to Mexico to pursue a PhD at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). The oligarchy has used every means to block his victory.
Gulnara Kasmalieva and Murat Djumaliev (Kyrgyzstan), Shadows, 1999.
On 14 January, the US International Development Finance Corporation (DFC) provided Ecuador with a loan of $2.8 billion to be used to pay off Ecuador’s debt to China and to ensure that Ecuador pledge to break commercial ties with China. Knowing that Arauz might win, the US and the oligarchy of Ecuador decided to tie the Andean country to an arrangement that could suffocate any progressive government. Formed in 2018, the DFC developed a project called América Crece or ‘Growth in the Americas’, whose entire policy framework aims to edge out Chinese business from the American hemisphere. Quito has since signed up for Washington’s ‘Clean Network’, a US State Department project to force countries to build telecommunications networks without a Chinese telecom provider involved in them. This particularly applies to the high-speed fifth generation (5G) networks. Ecuador joined the Clean Network in November 2020, which opened the door for the DFC loan.
Correa drew in $5 billion from Chinese banks to enhance Ecuador’s infrastructure (particularly for the construction of hydroelectric dams); Ecuador’s total external debt is $52 billion. Moreno and the United States have painted the Chinese funds as a ‘debt trap’, although there is no evidence that the Chinese banks have been anything but accommodating. Over the last six months of 2020, Chinese banks have been willing to put loan payments on hold until 2022 (this includes a delay on the repayment of the $474 million loan to the Export-Import Bank of China and the $417 million loan to the China Development Bank). Ecuador’s Finance Ministry says that, for now, the plan is for repayment to start in March 2022 and to end by 2029. Moreno took to Twitter to announce these two delays. There were no aggressive measures taken by these two banks nor from any other Chinese financial entity.
Essentially, the DFC loan attempts to sabotage an Arauz presidency. This US-imposed conflict against China in Latin America is part of a broader assault. On 30 January, Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research held a seminar alongside Instituto Simón Bolívar, ALBA Social Movimientos, and the No Cold War platform to reflect on the Latin American battlefield of this hybrid war.
The speakers included Alicia Castro (Argentina), Eduardo Regaldo Florido (Cuba), João Pedro Stedile (Brazil), Ricardo Menéndez (Venezuela), Monica Bruckmann (Peru/Brazil), Ambassador Li Baorong (China), and Fernando Haddad (Brazil).
Despite the hollowing out of democracy, elections remain one front in the political contest, and in that contest, the left fights to summon a democratic spirit. Perhaps poetry is the best way to articulate the texture of this conflict. Out of Ecuador’s rich tradition of emancipatory thinking came the writer and communist Jorge Enrique Adoum. Here’s a part of his powerful poem, Fugaz retorno (‘Fleeting Return’):
And we ran, like two runaways,
to the hard shore where stars
came apart. Fishermen told us
of successive victories in nearby provinces.
And our feet got wet with a spray of dawn,
full of roots that were ours and the world’s.
‘When is happiness?’, the poet asks. Tomorrow. Are we not all in search of tomorrow?
Firoz Mahmud (Bangladesh), Ouponibeshik/Porouponibeshik (‘Colonial/Postcolonial’), 2017.
To ingratiate himself to the United States, Moreno ejected WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange from Ecuador’s London embassy, arrested computer programmer and privacy activist Ola Bini on a concocted case, and launched a frontal attack against the Correistas. The political organisation of the Correistas was broken up, its leaders arrested, and any attempt to regroup for elections denied. Once such as example is the Social Compromise Force or Fuerza Compromiso Social platform, which the Correistas used to run for local elections in 2019; this platform was then banned in 2020. A February 2018 referendum was barrelled through the country, allowing the government to destroy the democratic structures of the National Electoral Council (CNE), the Constitutional Court, the Supreme Court, the Judiciary Council, the attorney general, the comptroller general, and others. Democracy was hollowed out.
A month before the 7 February 2021 presidential election, it appeared clear that in a fair election the candidate of the left, Andrés Arauz Galarza, would prevail. A range of pollsters suggested that Arauz would win in the first round with over the threshold of 40%. Arauz (age 35) is an attractive candidate with not a whiff of corruption or incompetence around him for his decade of service in the Central Bank and as a minister in the last two turbulent years of Correa’s government. When Correa left office, Arauz went to Mexico to pursue a PhD at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). The oligarchy has used every means to block his victory.
Gulnara Kasmalieva and Murat Djumaliev (Kyrgyzstan), Shadows, 1999.
On 14 January, the US International Development Finance Corporation (DFC) provided Ecuador with a loan of $2.8 billion to be used to pay off Ecuador’s debt to China and to ensure that Ecuador pledge to break commercial ties with China. Knowing that Arauz might win, the US and the oligarchy of Ecuador decided to tie the Andean country to an arrangement that could suffocate any progressive government. Formed in 2018, the DFC developed a project called América Crece or ‘Growth in the Americas’, whose entire policy framework aims to edge out Chinese business from the American hemisphere. Quito has since signed up for Washington’s ‘Clean Network’, a US State Department project to force countries to build telecommunications networks without a Chinese telecom provider involved in them. This particularly applies to the high-speed fifth generation (5G) networks. Ecuador joined the Clean Network in November 2020, which opened the door for the DFC loan.
Correa drew in $5 billion from Chinese banks to enhance Ecuador’s infrastructure (particularly for the construction of hydroelectric dams); Ecuador’s total external debt is $52 billion. Moreno and the United States have painted the Chinese funds as a ‘debt trap’, although there is no evidence that the Chinese banks have been anything but accommodating. Over the last six months of 2020, Chinese banks have been willing to put loan payments on hold until 2022 (this includes a delay on the repayment of the $474 million loan to the Export-Import Bank of China and the $417 million loan to the China Development Bank). Ecuador’s Finance Ministry says that, for now, the plan is for repayment to start in March 2022 and to end by 2029. Moreno took to Twitter to announce these two delays. There were no aggressive measures taken by these two banks nor from any other Chinese financial entity.
Essentially, the DFC loan attempts to sabotage an Arauz presidency. This US-imposed conflict against China in Latin America is part of a broader assault. On 30 January, Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research held a seminar alongside Instituto Simón Bolívar, ALBA Social Movimientos, and the No Cold War platform to reflect on the Latin American battlefield of this hybrid war.
The speakers included Alicia Castro (Argentina), Eduardo Regaldo Florido (Cuba), João Pedro Stedile (Brazil), Ricardo Menéndez (Venezuela), Monica Bruckmann (Peru/Brazil), Ambassador Li Baorong (China), and Fernando Haddad (Brazil).
Despite the hollowing out of democracy, elections remain one front in the political contest, and in that contest, the left fights to summon a democratic spirit. Perhaps poetry is the best way to articulate the texture of this conflict. Out of Ecuador’s rich tradition of emancipatory thinking came the writer and communist Jorge Enrique Adoum. Here’s a part of his powerful poem, Fugaz retorno (‘Fleeting Return’):
And we ran, like two runaways, to the hard shore where stars came apart. Fishermen told us of successive victories in nearby provinces. And our feet got wet with a spray of dawn, full of roots that were ours and the world’s.
‘When is happiness?’, the poet asks. Tomorrow. Are we not all in search of tomorrow?
On April 24, 2021, US President Joseph Biden declared that the massacre of 1.5 million Turkish Armenians in 1915 constituted genocide. As to whether genocide is the word Americans can consent to use about Native Americans who suffered death, torture, displacement, apartheid and disease at the hands, mainly, of European settlers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is a lot less clear, although some state governors have gone for it. As for slavery, not until July 2008 did the US House of Representatives apologize for American slavery of blacks and the subsequent discriminatory laws and practices that have continued to marginalize and oppress a population that today constitutes over 47 million or 14% of the US population. 9 States have officially apologized for their involvement in the enslavement of Africans.
