Demonstrators take part in a protest on Sept. 11 against the soaring living costs of tenants in Berlin. In a referendum later this week, voters will be asked if they support expropriating more than 200,000 rental housing units from the city's biggest landlords. (Paul Zinken/AFP/Getty)
Climate policies commit us to a calamitous 2.9C of global heating, but catastrophic changes can occur at even 1.5C or 2C
If there’s one thing we know about climate breakdown, it’s that it will not be linear, smooth or gradual. Just as one continental plate might push beneath another in sudden fits and starts, causing periodic earthquakes and tsunamis, our atmospheric systems will absorb the stress for a while, then suddenly shift. Yet, everywhere, the programmes designed to avert it are linear, smooth and gradual.
By 2049, Michael T. Klare says China will be a climate disaster zone, not a military superpower.
In recent months, Washington has had a lot to say about China’s ever-expanding air, naval and missile power. But when Pentagon officials address the topic, they generally speak less about that country’s current capabilities, which remain vastly inferior to those of the U.S., than the world they foresee in the 2030s and 2040s, when Beijing is expected to have acquired far more sophisticated weaponry.
Efforts are being blocked by the fossil fuel industry—probably the most powerful set of interests on earth.
For years, it was assumed the world wouldn't start seriously tackling climate change until we were directly confronted with its horrors—thereby revealing how truly reckless humans are.
A key point in the text is the need for one or more political organizations that have the organizing capacity to go beyond unions in fostering an understanding of the need for CLASS Solidarity! - Gene McGuckin
A wealth tax would raise badly-needed revenue. More importantly, it could reduce the fortunes—and power—of billionaires
In 2008, just after the election of Barack Obama, the two of us were trying to peddle an idea for a book decrying the rise of billionaires. A New York publisher told us he loved our proposal but it came too late. With Obama’s election, he said, the super-rich would soon be hit by steep taxes that would start depleting their fortunes. Their day in the sun was done.
Ace researchers dropped two blockbuster reports on us last week. The first — from the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the IPCC — hit on Monday with a worldwide thunderclap.
On August 16, 2021 President Biden addressed the nation to explain why the US military is pulling out of Afghanistan. To a lesser extent, he also tried to explain why the Afghan government and its 300,000 military forces imploded over the past weekend. With the Afghan State’s quick disappearing act, in a puff of smoke up went as well the more than $1 trillion spent by the US in Afghanistan since 2001.
Biden glossed over the real answer to the first point why the US is now pulling out. The second he never really answered.
