CAPITALOGENIC CLIMATE CHANGE

ERIC SCHECHTER—People justify the “fairness” of the system by referring to “property rights.” But where do those come from? According to our laws, if you buy stolen property, it does not thereby become yours. Rather, it still belongs to the people from whom it was stolen, or to their descendants. That is true no matter how many times the property is bought and sold — but if it goes through enough sales, the history becomes untraceable, returning the property to its “rightful owners” becomes unfeasible, and the rights of the original owners fade away. That’s called money laundering. For instance, at this point it would be difficult to give North America back to the descendants of the Native Americans. Soon the last Palestinians will be exterminated, and giving Palestine back to them will be impossible.

LEE CAMP—The government can’t truly represent the people unless the people know what the government is up to. But we’re not told most of what the government does. And when a whistleblower reveals what our government is up to — or a journalist like Julian Assange — they’re horribly persecuted and imprisoned. Furthermore, even if you wanted to claim we have a free democracy in the US, the two corporate parties agree on 90% of the core issues of our country. They agree on capitalism, on militarism, on Wall Street, on environmental destruction, on unlimited surveillance, on a massive prison state, on dystopian policing — they agree on just about everything. So if our choice is between those two parties, then it’s no choice at all. None of our elections are legit in this regard. 

Critics say a worrying pattern has emerged during Biden’s tenure, with his administration handing out drilling permits at a rate of more than 300 a month since his inauguration, a faster pace even than under Donald Trump.

At the Glasgow talks, known as Cop26, the US also declined to sign on to an agreement to end coal mining, or to phase out gasoline and diesel cars. “It truly calls into question whether the Biden administration’s climate agenda is nothing but broken promises,” said Jeremy Nichols of WildEarth Guardians, an environmental group.

MICHAL T KLARE—At this moment, the Department of Defense is preparing a new edition of its National Defense Strategy and this time climate change will finally be officially identified as a major threat to American security. In an executive order signed on January 27th, his first full day in office, President Joe Biden directed the secretary of defense to “consider the risks of climate change” in that new edition.

There can be no doubt that the Chinese military leadership will translate that new National Defense Strategy as soon as it’s released, probably later this year. After all, a lot of it will be focused on the sort of U.S. military moves to counter China’s rise in Asia that have been emphasized by both the Trump and Biden administrations. But it will be interesting to see what they make of the language on climate change and if similar language begins to appear in Chinese military documents.

An abandoned supertanker holding more than one million barrels of crude oil has been slowly corroding off Yemen’s coast, and a new study out Monday warns that the consequences of an “imminent” spill in the Red Sea could be graver than initially thought — cutting off access to clean water and food aid for millions of people in a matter of days and completely decimating the region’s fishing stocks within three weeks.