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Collapse of Industrial Civilization

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Collapse of Industrial Civilization

Monthly Archives: June 2012

Capitalism is Not Compatible with a Healthy Ecosystem

30 Saturday Jun 2012

Posted by xraymike79 in Capitalism, Consumerism, Corporate State, Ecological Overshoot, Environmental Degradation

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Capitalism, Consumerism, Corporatocracy, Economic Collapse, Economic Growth, Environmental Collapse, Financial Elite, Gross Inequality, Neoliberal Capitalism, The Elite 1%


 
I’ll be going on sabbatical for a while, so I’ll leave you with a further discussion of the failings of Capitalism. Any talk of growth is simply another version of the capitalist system. In order to ensure the survival of our species, we must break from that paradigm. It’s as simple as that. Below are excerpts of an essay which hits on the major problems of our current economic system. I’ll post again when I can, but the next two weeks will be sporadic.

Harmony and Ecological Civilization: Beyond the Capitalist Alienation of Nature…

… Harmony in the world—among its people and between humans and the rest of the ecosystems—is not possible in the context of capitalism. Capitalism, a system that has been in existence for some 500 years (merchant capitalism for approximately 250 years and industrial capitalism for about 250 years)—a relatively short time in the 150,000 year history of anatomically modern humans—has shown that it fosters interpersonal relations and metabolic interactions with the earth that are detrimental to achieving a harmonious existence. This is a result of capitalism’s basic characteristics and the relationships it creates as it normally functions. The purpose of capitalism is not to satisfy human needs and preserve the environment. There is only one purpose and driving force—ultimately responsible for both its dynamic periods and its crises and long periods of slow growth (stagnation)—and that is the accumulation of capital without end. The capitalist system has a number of basic characteristics and also fosters specific human characteristics and relationships. Here are ten key aspects of capitalism:

  • It has to grow (or else it is in crisis) and its very logic and motivating force impels growth.
  • It has no other driving force than the accumulation of ever greater amounts of capital.
  • Through the creation of so-called “externalities” (or side effects) it wreaks damage on humans as well as the ecosystem and the life support systems needed by humanity and other species. In Paul Sweezy’s words: “As far as the natural environment is concerned, capitalism perceives it not as something to be cherished and enjoyed but as a means to the paramount ends of profit-making and still more capital accumulation.”1
  • It promotes the use of nonrenewable resources without regard to the needs of future generations, as if there was no end to them, and abuses even renewable resources such as ocean fisheries and forests.
  • It creates vast inequality in income, wealth, and power both within and between countries. Not only class, but race, gender, and other inequalities are built into its laws of motion.
  • It requires and produces a reserve army of labor—people precariously connected to the economy, most kept in poverty or near poverty—so that labor is available during economic upswings and workers can easily be fired when not needed by businesses.
  • It promotes national economic and political competition and imperialism, leading to wars for domination and access to resources.
  • It fosters and rewards those particular human traits that are useful for thriving or even just existing in such a possessive-individualist society—selfishness, individualism, competition, greed, exploitation of others, consumerism—while not allowing the full expression of those human characteristics needed for a harmonious society (cooperation, sharing, empathy, and altruism).
  • It leads to the breakdown of human health since people operate in a hierarchical society, with many working under dangerous and physically debilitating conditions or in jobs that are repetitive and boring—while subject to job loss or fear of losing their job. (There are many adverse long-term health effects following the loss of one’s job.)2
  • It leads to the breakdown of healthy communities as people become more solitary in outlook and behavior and indigenous culture is replaced by the dominant national or international capitalist culture and outlook. People become dedicated to obtaining more for themselves and their families and depending less on reciprocal relationships with others.

The growth imperative of capitalism deserves special attention because it is one of the major stumbling blocks with respect to harmony between humans and the environment. Accumulation without end means using ever greater quantities of resources—without end—even as we find ways to use resources more efficiently. An economy growing at the very meager rate of 1 percent a year will double in about seventy-two years, but one growing at 2 percent a year, still a low rate, will double in size in thirty-six years. And when growing at 3 and 4 percent, economies will double in twenty-four and eighteen years respectively. China recently has seen recorded growth rates of up to 10 percent, meaning economic output doubles at a rate of approximately every seven years! Yet, we are already using up resources far too fast from the one planet we have—depleting the stocks of nonrenewable resources rapidly and misusing and overusing resources that are theoretically “renewable.” If the world’s economy doubles within the next twenty to thirty years this can only hasten the descent into ecological, and probably societal, chaos and destruction.

Thus capitalism promotes the processes, relationships, and outcomes that are precisely the opposite of those needed for an ecologically sound, just, harmonious society.

…

Rational and useful alternative solutions to any problem depend upon a realistic analysis and diagnosis as to what is causing it to occur. When such analysis is lacking substance the proposed “solutions” will most likely be useless. For example, there are people fixated on nonrenewable resource depletion that is caused, in their opinion, by “overpopulation.” Thus, they propose, as the one and only “solution,” a rapid “degrowth” of the world’s population. Programs that provide contraceptives to women in poor countries are therefore offered as an important tool to solving the global ecological problem. However, those concerned with there being too many people generally do not discuss the economic system that is so destructive to the environment and people or the critical moral and practical issue of the vast inequalities created by capitalism. Even the way that capitalism itself requires population growth as part of its overall expansion is ignored.

Thus, a critical aspect almost always missing from discussions by those concerned with population as it affects resource use and pollution is that the overwhelming majority of the earth’s environmental problems are caused by the wealthy and their lifestyles—and by a system of capital accumulation that predominantly serves their interests. The World Bank staff estimates that the wealthiest 10 percent of humanity are responsible for approximately 60 percent of all resource use and therefore 60 percent of the pollution (most probably an underestimate). Commentators fixated on nonrenewable resources and pollution as the overriding issues cannot see that one of their main “solutions”—promoting birth control in poor countries—gets nowhere near to even beginning to address the real problem. It should go without saying that poor people should have access to medical services, including those involving family planning. This should be considered a basic human right. The rights of women in this respect are one of the key indicators of democratic and human development. But how can people fixated on the mere population numbers ignore the fact that it is the world’s affluent classes that account for the great bulk of those problems—whether one is looking at resource use, consumption, waste, or environmental pollution—that are considered so important to the survival of society and even humanity?

In addition to the vast quantity of resources used and pollution caused by wealthy individuals, governments are also responsible. The U.S. military is one of the world’s prime users of resources—from oil to copper, zinc, tin, and rare earths. The military is also is the single largest consumer of energy in the United States.5

While capitalism creates many of the features and relationships discussed above, we must keep in mind that long before capitalism existed there were negative societal aspects such as warfare, exploitation of people and resources, and ecological damage. However, capitalism solidifies and makes these problems systemic while at the same time creating other negative aspects.

Living in Harmony with the Planet

It is certain that there is no way to reach a truly harmonious civilization with an economic system in which decisions are made by private individuals based on how much capital will be accumulated as well as personal greed and consumerism. In such a society “[s]ocial relations became but reflections of the dominating force of society’s capitalist economics.”6Hierarchical class structures are solidified—with workers (blue and white collar), small business owners (this includes farmers and craftspeople working on their own or in small units), and owners and managers of large businesses. The relationship of a worker to a business manager or owner reflects differences of wealth and power in the workplace and in the world outside. And the worker and the boss have differing interests. The boss is trying to maximize profits while the worker is trying to get more income and better working conditions. Because of the motive force of capitalism and the procedures, practices, and approaches embedded in its DNA, there is no way to reform or modify the system to accomplish the goals of sustainability, harmony, or ecological civilization. Capitalism, in its very essence, is anti-sustainability, anti-harmony, and anti-ecology. For Marx capitalism generated an “irreparable rift” in the metabolism of nature and society, requiring the “restoration” of this basic metabolism essential to life—a restoration that necessitated a more harmonious social order beyond capitalism.7

No one can predict the details of any future civilization. But, to be ecological and socially sustainable—basic requirements for harmonious society—an economy will need to have the sole purpose of satisfying basic human material and nonmaterial needs (which, of course, includes a healthy ecosystem) for all people. As with many pre-capitalist societies, economics will need to be submerged within human relationships and must be under control of the people…

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Ponzi Schemes and Pitchforks

29 Friday Jun 2012

Posted by xraymike79 in Climate Change, Consumerism, Corporate State, Ecological Overshoot, Environmental Degradation, Peak Oil

≈ 6 Comments

Tags

Australia, Colorado River, Consumerism, Ecological Overshoot, Economic Growth, Environmental Collapse, Financial Elite, Gina Rinehart, Gross Inequality, Inverted Totalitarianism, Las vegas, Libertarianism, Neoliberal Capitalism, Peak Oil, Peak Water, Poverty, The Elite 1%

I mentioned in my last post “Things are Heating Up for Heads on a Pike” that Las Vegas is building another straw below the existing water intake pipes which are in danger of going dry due to a sinking water line in the Colorado River and Lake Mead. Since Vegas gets 90% of its drinking water from the river, its evaporation and depletion puts in jeopardy not only that city but also the 38 million people in the Southwest dependent on the river. If you read the article I linked to, then you’ll know Vegas has been plagued by all sorts of problems like cave-ins and floodings in the construction of this new, longer straw to suck out what remains of a river in critical condition from severe drought and over-usage, both of which are exacerbated by global warming:

The Lake Mead surface level has dropped about 100 feet in elevation since the lake was full in 2000, bureau spokeswoman Rose Davis said. It is about half-full today — displaying a distinctive white mineral “bathtub ring” between the low and high water lines. – source

———————

…water authority General Manager Pat Mulroy has described the third intake project as a race against time. The problem is there is nothing very speedy about construction on this scale.

The finished, 20-foot diameter intake pipe will allow the authority to draw up to 1.2 billion gallons of water a day from Lake Mead even if the surface drops another 90 feet.

It also will give the authority access to the deepest part of the lake, where the coolest, cleanest water is found. – source

The German-buit machine used to dig this new water intake looks like something out of a science fiction movie, over 600 feet long and costing $25 million:

The $25 million tunnel boring machine was designed and built in Germany specifically for the third intake project.

“It’s the BMW of TBMs,” McDonald joked.

The machine crossed the globe on a container ship. It took 61 tractor-trailers to deliver it in pieces from the Port of Long Beach, Calif., to the job site at Lake Mead.

Fully assembled, the machine is the length of two football fields and weighs more than three Boeing 747 jetliners. The cutter head, a ridged platter 231/2 feet tall and studded with disks made from a special alloy, weighs 150 tons all by itself. – source

This project doesn’t come cheap at a cost of $800 million dollars. Now I find it rather humorous when the Vegas customers get their new water bills, causing them to fly off the handle and grab a pitch fork:

A couple of weeks ago, the Las Vegas Valley Water District got an earful from customers about a steep rate hike on businesses.

On Thursday, it was the Southern Nevada Water Authority’s turn.

A handful of angry business owners and residents attacked the rate increase during the authority board’s monthly meeting, and many more people have called and sent letters about their ballooning bills.

The barrage of complaints and concerns prompted Clark County Commissioner Steve Sisolak to issue an unusual apology of sorts: He didn’t understand what he was voting for when he voted for the rate hike earlier this year.

“I was under a totally different impression when we passed this increase,” Sisolak said.

He said he had no idea that the new infrastructure surcharge he helped approve would boost the monthly bills for some businesses, churches and nonprofits by 200 percent or more. He thought most people would have to pay a flat monthly increase of about $5.

If he didn’t know then, he certainly does now…

…Sisolak and others are trying to speed up a planned review of the charge, which was originally supposed to be done as part of a larger planning process over the next year and half by a new citizens committee being assembled.

Sisolak said some water customers may not be able to wait that long.

“What I’m hearing from the business community is they’re not going to make it 18 to 20 months,” he said.

McAnallen said something needs to be done. The business owners he is talking to can scarcely afford the current surcharge, which is slated to last for the next three years. If no other solution is found by 2016, the charge will have to be doubled to cover the authority’s debt load, he said.

Authority officials have acknowledged that the surcharge affects businesses more than residents, but they said the new fee is necessary to pay down roughly $2.5 billion in construction debt and finish funding an $800 million intake being built to keep water flowing to the valley even if Lake Mead continues to shrink.

Such projects used to be paid for with the spoils of growth, namely connection charges from new homes and commercial buildings. When growth stopped, so did the water authority’s primary source of construction money.

It’s not just business owners who are complaining about the surcharge.

While the average single-family home saw its bill go up by about $5, some older homes with larger lots and water lines took a bigger hit.

Lifelong Las Vegas resident Mary Joy Alderman lives in a 60-year-old downtown home that sits on an acre of land served by a 1-inch water meter. She said her bill just jumped to about $36 though she has slashed her monthly water use to around 1,000 gallons – less than a tenth of what the average home consumes – and doesn’t water her landscaping at all…

Did you read that:

“Such projects used to be paid for with the spoils of growth, namely connection charges from new homes and commercial buildings. When growth stopped, so did the water authority’s primary source of construction money.”

Now this falls in line with the analysis that suburbia is one giant Ponzi scheme, as argued here.

Now I want to go back and talk also about one of those heads that belongs on a pike. One of the major problems facing industrial civilization and mankind is the failure to be honest with ourselves. And that problem is compounded when you are not given the facts of your predicament. The captains of industry who benefit from business-as-usual like to keep the public in the dark and brain-washed about free-market capitalism, a dogma that has brought the planet to its knees and the continued existence of the Homo-Sapien species into question. Gina Rinehart, the richest woman in the world, is a case in point:

Addressing a libertarian think-tank in Perth last July, the British climate change sceptic Christopher Monckton urged Australians to create a home-grown version of Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News. The “super-rich”, he said, should invest in the media, install like-minded commentators and give the country “a proper dose of free-market thinking.

Lord Monckton’s visit was part-funded by one of his biggest Australian fans, Gina Rinehart, the multi-billionaire iron ore magnate. A year on, Ms Rinehart – the country’s wealthiest individual – is on the verge of becoming its newest media mogul, a prospect that is sending a chill through newsrooms, boardrooms and the corridors of government…

…Rinehart never gives interviews. But her values – pro-free market, cheap foreign labour and tax concessions for mining, and anti-government regulation, red tape and climate change science – are well known…

“She regards journalists as either socialists or communists,” says Paul Barry, an investigative journalist and author. “Not only does she know nothing about the media business, but she doesn’t understand or sympathise with the media.

“I think she would be considerably worse than Rupert Murdoch as a proprietor, not least because she’s coming into a newspaper [group] with an entirely opposite stance to the one she would like it to take.”

This lady’s mindset sounds almost cartoonish in its prejudice and ideological bent. Firstly, she can’t possibly understand what freedom of the press means other that the dictate of ‘freedom to buy the press’ and convert it into a mouthpiece for her wealth-extraction agenda. Secondly, Mrs Rinehart and her ilk don’t acknowledge the reality that capitalism cannot exist without the ability to pollute freely and externalize as much costs as possible onto the environment and communities in which she does not reside. But as I said in Tuesday’s post, the über wealthy will not be spared from escalating climate chaos. Thirdly, capitalism cannot exist without cheap and plentiful fossil fuels of which we are starting to scrape the bottom of the barrel as evidenced by more extreme and environmentally destructive measures such as tar sands, deep-sea drilling and gas fracking. Fourthly, capitalism depends on infinite growth to survive, as explained here. Euan Mearns talked about the death of capitalism recently at the 2012 ASPO meeting. Jeremy Grantham also sees the problems with capitalism coming down to debt, politics, environmental damage, and inhumanity.

Capitalism ultimately leads to barbarism and heads on a pike for those not willing to face harsh certainties.

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Things are Heating Up for Heads on a Pike

28 Thursday Jun 2012

Posted by xraymike79 in Climate Change, Corporate State, Environmental Degradation, Pollution

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Climate Change, Climate Refugees, Coal, Ecological Overshoot, Environmental Collapse, Epic Colorado Fire, Gina Rinehart, Global Warming, Peak Soil, Peak Water, Resource Wars, Soil Erosion, Southwest Wild Fires

I posted a snarky comment over at the Rogue Columnist, but I’m really beginning to think that it’s not far off from what will be a reality in the not too distant future. Read just the following two articles to see what I mean. The estimates of water loss to the Colorado River will be much greater than predicted in my post “When The River Runs Dry“. Las Vegas is already frantically constructing another straw at a lower height to capture water from the river.

Epic Wildfire Rages in Colorado as Record Heat Continues …

…The heat in Colorado is one ingredient that along with unusually dry conditions and strong winds is creating one of the worst wildfire seasons on record in the Rocky Mountain State. The High Park Fire has already burned 83,000 acres, making it one of the largest fires in state history. More than 1,800 personnel are currently battling the blaze, which has already cost at least $31.5 million, according to a U.S. Forest Service website. Another wildfire began on Tuesday and threatened the city of Boulder, causing staff at the National Center for Atmospheric Research to be evacuated.

According to a recent Climate Central analysis, Colorado was the 20th-fastest warming state between 1970 and 2011, with average temperatures increasing by about 0.5°F per decade. Arizona, which is also grappling with hot weather and wildfires, was the fastest-warming state, with an increase of about 0.6°F per decade.

The heat is not just affecting the West, however. The High Plains and even the South have been sweating it out under a dome of high pressure, which is causing a broad area of sinking air. As air sinks it warms, and this also inhibits the formation of showers and thunderstorms that could offer some heat relief.

During the June 18-to-24 period, 731 daily high temperature records and 798 daily warm low temperature records were set or tied in the U.S., compared to 154 record cold daily high temperatures and 131 record cold daily low temperature records, according to the National Climatic Data Center.

Between June 19-25, there were 14 all-time high temperature records set or tied, along with two all-time overnight warm low temperature records. There were no all-time cold temperature records set or tied during the same period.

In a long-term trend that demonstrates the effects of a warming climate, daily record-high temperatures have recently been outpacing daily record-lows by an average of 2-to-1, and this imbalance is expected to grow as the climate continues to warm. According to a 2009 study, if the climate were not warming, this ratio would be expected to be even. Other studies have shown that climate change increases the odds of extreme heat events and may make them warmer and longer lasting.

Bill Deger, a meteorologist for AccuWeather in State College, Pa., posted a comprehensive rundown of some of the more noteworthy heat records in the West and the High Plains.

“A couple of 113-degree readings in Kansas on Monday nearly claimed the top spot for the hottest temperature on planet earth. Only six other observing stations in the Middle East were hotter on Monday, with Makkah, Saudi Arabia, leading the pack at a blistering 117,” Deger noted. “A cooperative weather station near Tribune, Kan., which set an all-time record high of 109 on Sunday, turned around and beat the new record by a full 2 degrees on Monday.”

Deger wrote that Galveston, Texas had its earliest 100-degree day in any calendar year since at least 1875.

The heat is slowly building east, and records may fall during the next few days in cities such as Chicago, St. Louis, and Kansas City. The heat wave should reach the Mid-Atlantic states by the end of the week as well…

And new research on soil erosion and the dying forests in the Southwest…

Dying trees in Southwest set stage for erosion, water loss in Colorado River …

(June 27, 2012) — New research concludes that a one-two punch of drought and mountain pine beetle attacks are the primary forces that have killed more than 2.5 million acres of pinyon pine and juniper trees in the American Southwest during the past 15 years, setting the stage for further ecological disruption.

The widespread dieback of these tree species is a special concern, scientists say, because they are some of the last trees that can hold together a fragile ecosystem, nourish other plant and animal species, and prevent serious soil erosion.

The major form of soil erosion in this region is wind erosion. Dust blowing from eroded hills can cover snowpacks, cause them to absorb heat from the sun and melt more quickly, and further reduce critically-short water supplies in the Colorado River basin.

The findings were published in the journal Ecohydrology by scientists from the College of Forestry at Oregon State University and the Conservation Biology Institute in Oregon. NASA supported the work.

“Pinyon pine and juniper are naturally drought-resistant, so when these tree species die from lack of water, it means something pretty serious is happening,” said Wendy Peterman, an OSU doctoral student and soil scientist with the Conservation Biology Institute. “They are the last bastion, the last trees standing and in some cases the only thing still holding soils in place.”

“These areas could ultimately turn from forests to grasslands, and in the meantime people are getting pretty desperate about these soil erosion issues,” she said. “And anything that further reduces flows in the Colorado River is also a significant concern.”

One of those heads on a pike will be this woman.

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Clawing at the Edges of a Bottomless Pit

27 Wednesday Jun 2012

Posted by xraymike79 in Climate Change, Consumerism, Ecological Overshoot, Environmental Degradation, Peak Oil, Pollution

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

Climate Change, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Corporate State, Economic Collapse, Fracking, Mass Media Propaganda, Neoliberal Capitalism, Peak Water, The Elite 1%, the Sky is Pink, Toxic Groundwater

I’ve been at this blogging for about six weeks now, reading and researching industrial civilization’s demise. The more one goes back and looks at the wholesale destruction we have done and continue to do to this planet, and in turn ourselves, the more you come to realize how blind and foolish we have been. Entire ecosystems have been wiped off the face of the earth and whole environmental systems altered beyond their normal evolution. In place of forests, jungles, and deserts, we have constructed vast tracts of monoculture industrial farming, endless vistas of cookie cutter suburbia, thousands upon thousands of miles of asphalt roads, parking lots, and concrete paths, and cathedral-like malls for the citizenry to partake in the consumption of goods made by someone we’ll never meet and shipped from lands we may never visit.

What underpinned the creation of this entire edifice of modern man in less than two centuries? The power to transform the earth in our image came from cheap, energy-dense fossil fuel, i.e. oil. So highly dense in energy is oil that just one barrel of it equates to the labor of one man working forty hours a week for twelve years. Was all of this frenetic, ant-like labor worth it if, at the end of the day, we find that all of that effort to be for nought, cleared away by an escalating, civilization-ending climate chaos? It seems that we went to a party and drank so much of the intoxicating drinks offered to us that we ended up killing ourselves from the overdose and subsequent poisoning. For those sitting at the top of the capitalist hierarchy, do they not fully understand that a world thrown out of balance will not spare the elite sitting behind their barb-wire walled and guarded mansions? Is the desperate clawing at low EROEI fossil fuel sources worth the expense of further, unmitigated environmental destruction just to eke out a few more decades of what is inevitably a self-destructive system? What will we be left with but a completely poisoned and pillaged planet with no resources left to construct an alternative that might replace the current bankrupt system.

Right now we are in the intoxication phase, blind to the self-imposed eradication that comprises our present course in energy policy. So blind are the elite that they are willing to lie and propagandize in order to make sure the plans go forth. Having poisoned the biosphere, oceans, and land, the only place left seems to be deep beneath the ground beyond everyone’s sight where the remaining life-giving reservoirs of water rest.

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When the River Runs Dry

26 Tuesday Jun 2012

Posted by xraymike79 in Climate Change, Ecological Overshoot, Environmental Degradation, Pollution

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

Aldo Leopold, Bureau of Reclamation, Chasing Water, Colorado River, Colorado River Delta, James Lawrence Powell, Peak Water, Pete McBride

“Civilization exists by geological consent, subject to change without notice.” — Will Durant

I just saw a very somber, but beautiful mini-documentary about the Colorado River called Chasing Water by photo journalist Pete McBride. It is the highest utilized river on the planet relative to irrigation and human consumption. Once hailed as a wonder of the world and North America’s greatest estuary, the Colorado River Delta is now a barren wasteland:

In 1922, the great naturalist Aldo Leopold canoed through the delta, which he described as “a milk and honey wilderness” and a land of “a hundred green lagoons.” It was home back then to deer, quail, raccoon, bobcat, jaguar and vast flocks of waterfowl, and its 2-million-acre expanse was a crucial stopover on the Pacific flyway, providing respite and feeding grounds for millions of migratory birds as they journeyed across the western Americas.

Fisheries in the upper Gulf of California depended on the Colorado delta too. The totoaba, a relative of white sea bass that could grow to more than 250 pounds, would migrate from the upper gulf to spawn in the delta’s brackish estuaries. For at least 1,000 years, the indigenous Cucapá, the “people of the river,” fished and farmed in the delta, keying their lives to the river’s ebb and flow.

Today, the Colorado delta is a shadow of its former self. Once one of the planet’s most vital aquatic ecosystems, it is now one of the most threatened. A low-altitude flight over the region reveals a desiccated landscape of salt flats and cracked earth. There is little sign of a living river because the river is gone; in all but the wettest years, it disappears into the desert sands a short distance south of the border.

Its waters are siphoned off by several states, the lion’s share going to California. According to a study last year by the Bureau of Reclamation, the reliability of this water flow is not going to hold up into the future. Quoting from a recent article in the National Geographic, the results of the study are profound:

Last year the Bureau of Reclamation finalized their first assessment of climate change impacts on Colorado River flows, concluding they would most probably decline by 8.7% by 2060.  That’s a loss of 1,300,000 acre-feet, the entire annual capacity of the canal diverting water to Los Angeles, Orange, and San Diego counties.

Now we have confirmation from Reclamation that whatever water is left in the Colorado River won’t go as far.  Hotter temperatures will drive an increase in water demand.  The average projected increase in water use, based solely on temperature increases, is 500,000 acre-feet.

In simple terms, increased temperatures mean that every living thing will need more water to survive.  This includes all the lawns we water and all the crops we grow with Colorado River water.

Reclamation hasn’t put these two numbers together yet in a public document, but the result is profound.  The climate change impact on Colorado River water translates into a decrease in supply and an increase in demand totaling a deficit of  1,800,000 acre-feet.  Keep in mind, this is just the average, not the worst case.  Moreover this is just the deficit created by climate change, and does not account for the inevitable increase in water demand by a growing regional population.

In his book Dead Pool, author James Lawrence Powell says that the Bureau of Reclamation and politicians used flagrant exaggerations of not only construction costs, but also water flows in order to facilitate the building of dams along the Colorado River. Taxpayers were left with the bill for overpriced dams which delivered water costing far more than the value of the crops it fed. The massive Western water projects amounted to what Powell calls a “a kind of hydraulic Ponzi scheme.”

The Bureau’s Colorado River Compact promised more water to the various states than what the river could realistically deliver because its water-flow projections were based on measurements of a period before 1922 during the ‘wet years’ when the river’s annual flow averaged 21 million acre-feet (MAF).

Even though current Colorado River allocations are based on a presumed annual flow of 16 MAF, historical records taken partially from tree-ring studies show the Colorado River to have an average of only 14.6 MAF per year over the last four and a half centuries. If you couple these findings with that of the climate change predictions discussed above, then unless there is some new miracle for conserving a massive amount of water, a mass exodus of the population from the Southwest seems likely over the next several decades. Making matters worse, the Southwest is the fastest growing region in the country. Climate change has already had a visible effect on the Southwest’s water supply, says Powell:

The flow of the Colorado River during the twenty-first century dropped so much faster than the experts thought possible that by 2004, Lakes Powell and Mead together held 20 MAF less than their worst-case forecast. …Including the relatively wet 2005, the average inflow to Lake Powell during the first eight years of the twenty-first century is down by an average of 40 percent [from the twentieth-century average].

Others are already seeing the handwriting on the wall with climate refugees here in the U.S.:

No one has a crystal ball. But it is now predicted that the Southwest will experience a permanent drought, far worse than the 1930s Dust Bowl. That may cause massive population migration in a breathtakingly short period of time (in the next four decades), as the arable water supply from Kansas to California dries up. University of Arizona studies indicate that if greenhouse gases continue to go unchecked, the overused Colorado River – which supplies municipal and agricultural water to seven western states – may be reduced to half of its current flow under a plausible worst-case scenario.

…Millions of displaced Americans could be on the move. They will not be the first climate refugees in the world, nor the last, but they certainly will be knocking on our door.

Other readings:

Reading L.A.: Marc Reisner’s ‘Cadillac Desert‘ 

CADILLAC DESERT: The American West And Its Disappearing Water, Revised Edition

Last Call at the Oasis 

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America: The Mafia State (It’s no exaggeration)

25 Monday Jun 2012

Posted by xraymike79 in Corporate State, Inequality, Wall Street Fraud

≈ 1 Comment

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Banking Oligarchy, Bill Moyers, Corporate State, Corporatocracy, Financial Elite, Gas Fracking, Gross Inequality, Matt Taibbi, Neoliberal Capitalism, Poverty, Regulatory Capture, Richard Wolff, The Elite 1%, To-Big-To-Fail Banks, unwashed public, Wall Street Fraud, William Tabb, Yves Smith

This is a stellar interview with Matt Taibbi and Yves Smith worth watching from start to finish. They cover a lot of ground in a short time including the shredding of the social fabric by Wall Street malfeasance and the fact that your grandmother’s life is more endangered by a high-finance businessman in a suit and tie rather than the local purse snatcher on the street corner. Remember when Lloyd Blankfein admitted that some of their financial instruments were of no benefit to society?


 
Excerpt on the comparisons with Wall Street and the Mafia Dons:

BILL MOYERS: You’re describing a corrupt financial and political system. And both of you in recent writings, your current article in “Rolling Stone,” which is devastating on the scam that the “Wall Street learned from the Mafia,” and a recent column you wrote about the mafia state, you’re both using that metaphor to apply to our financial and political system. When I read your pieces, you’re not playing with words there. You mean it.

YVES SMITH: Yeah.

BILL MOYERS: Why do you mean it?

YVES SMITH: Well, the mafia, when it gets to be big enough, first thing it has services that people feel they need if they’re in a difficult situation. So, for example, loan sharking. If you really need money, they do have the money. And people enter into these loan shark deals even though they know it’s going to be very difficult to pay 20 percent or more interest and they’ll have their legs broken if they don’t pay back.

And the banks actually behave very much in that manner when they find people who really need money. So you see this with credit cards, you know, that, or, and with mortgages. That if you hit– it’s not this if you hit any tripwire, that, you know, become in arrears, the banks basically act in this very extortionate manner and don’t cut any breaks.

MATT TAIBBI: And I think that there’s also this, they are the mafia because of their vast criminality in Wall Street now is that it’s bribery, theft, fraud, bid rigging, price fixing, gambling, loan sharking. All of these things, it’s all organized.

I mean, the story I just wrote about, which was about the systematic rigging of municipal bond auctions, which affected every community in every state in the country and all of the major banks were involved, including Chase.

They were rigging the auctions that were designed to create a fair rate of return on the investments that towns were getting on their– the money they borrowed for municipal bonds. And this is not like something that the mafia does. This is what the mafia does. The mafia has historically, it’s one of their staple businesses, is bid rigging for construction or garbage or, you know, street cleaning services, whatever it is.

They’re doing exactly the same thing. The only thing that’s different is there’s no violence involved. But what their method of control is that they’re ubiquitous. They have this incredible political power that the mafia never had.

YVES SMITH: And they also have what amounts to an oligopoly. I mean, for many of these services, you have a great deal of difficulty going beyond the five biggest banks, you know? This is– it’s the consequence of too big to fail is that when, you know, some of the smaller players, again, you know, like– JPMorgan buying Bear Stearns.

In the crisis, when the smaller players got sick, they were merged into the bigger players. So now if you want– for a lot of these services, there aren’t that many players for you to go to. You really have no choice in– other than to deal with the big banks.

BILL MOYERS: Congress is paid to be informed and to hold these guys accountable. Why don’t they ask the kind of questions you’re dealing with here?

MATT TAIBBI: People refuse to look at these banks and think of them as organized crime organizations.

They in their eyes, organized crime is always either the Italian mafia or the Irish mafia. This isn’t what it looks like. But that is who they are. And I think that they’re treated with a kind of deference and respect, because traditionally that’s not who they were. They were these icons of finance who helped build this country.

But that’s not who they are anymore. And I think, it’s hard for people to wrap their heads around that and treat them the way they should be treated.

YVES SMITH: Well, I think people don’t want to think that there’s something wrong with leaders. And CEOs are leaders of the business community. If you really believe that CEOs of businesses that are really fundamental to the economy are corrupt, you have to think of a very serious restructuring of the business and financial system.

And even if people kind of intellectually might be willing to contemplate that, they don’t really want to go to what the implications are. So it’s much easier for them to block out that thought.

Critical to remember is that the key cause of the short-term, predatory behavior discussed above is what is called the ‘financialization’ of capitalism over the last several decades. In other words, the productive aspect of the economy, such as manufacturing and research and development, were replaced by manipulation of the economy with financial instruments and creating wealth-extracting bubbles. An example of a corporation becoming financialized is GE:

Since over half of GE’s revenue is derived from financial services, it is arguably a financial company with a manufacturing arm.

Examples of financial bubbles in our economy are the dot-com bubble, the commodities bubble, the housing bubble, the student loan debt bubble, the credit card debt bubble, or even more recently the gas fracking bubble:

…Chesapeake and its lesser competitors resemble a Ponzi scheme, overhyping the promise of shale gas in an effort to recoup their huge investments in leases and drilling. When the wells don’t pay off, the firms wind up scrambling to mask their financial troubles with convoluted off-book accounting methods. “This is an industry that is caught in the grip of magical thinking,” Berman says. “In fact, when you look at the level of debt some of these companies are carrying, and the questionable value of their gas reserves, there is a lot in common with the subprime mortgage market just before it melted down.” Like generations of energy kingpins before him, it would seem, McClendon’s primary goal is not to solve America’s energy problems, but to build a pipeline directly from your wallet into his.

The numbers vary slightly on the internet as to the finance industry’s take of the total profits of the economy, but the overall trend has been an ever-increasing slice of the economic pie. Just before the financial meltdown of 2008, finance accounted for more than a third of total profit in the economy and it has come roaring back since then. The Free Market Economy has evolved from a supposed model of efficient use of capital for the benefit of production to the efficient funneling upwards of capital to the elite 1%. And of course there is the revolving door between the government and finance industry. The graph below shows the growth of the finance industry as a percentage of the total corporate profits since 1948:

American companies are now run by money men who have different priorities than those business leaders of the past. David Bollier explains:

We all know the story of enclosure as it applies to the commons. The lesser-known story is that businesses are enclosing themselves – aggressively cannibalizing their own internal productive capacities in order to maximize short-term profits.

Harvard business guru Clayton Christensen argues in Forbes magazine that business executives are so habituated to seeing the world through a scrim of financial abstractions that they are blindly undercutting their own long-term productive capacities. The problem is so pervasive, says Christensen, that “whole sectors of the economy are dying…”

Financialization could be called the degenerate, end-stage of capitalism where making money from money is the be-all and end-all of corporate decision-making.

Professor Wolff discusses with William Tabb this financialization of the economy in more detail here. Our economy has become a giant Ponzi scheme. This won’t end well.

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Profiting Off Acts of Desperation

24 Sunday Jun 2012

Posted by xraymike79 in Climate Change, Corporate State, Ecological Overshoot, Environmental Degradation, Peak Oil, Pollution, Wall Street Fraud

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

Antarctic, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Corporate State, Ecological Overshoot, Environmental Collapse, Fracking, Neoliberal Capitalism, Obama, Peak Oil, Peak Water, Privatization of the Commons, Third-Worldization of America, Toxic Groundwater

The other day I saw the headline story ‘Injection Wells: The Poison Beneath Us‘ at ProPublica and wondered to what lengths we as a society will go to keep industrial civilization running before we come to our flippin’ senses figure out that our current way of life is neither sustainable nor the model for the rest of the world to emulate. BraneSpace did a post on this subject as another obvious sign that we have hit peak oil:

…I want to confine attention in this blog to the energy issue, that of Peak Oil certainly having passed in 2005, and the further evidence being what I call energy pursuit desperation. Evidence? Since 2005, 680,000 waste and injection wells have been drilled, of which nearly 150,000 have injected millions of liters of toxic industrial fluids below the surface to “frack” natural gas. None of this polluted water can then be incorporated back into the hydrological cycle because of the 190 -odd contaminants (most carcinogenic) that the fracked water contains.

“In 10 to 100 years we are going to find out that most of our groundwater is polluted,” according to Mario Salazar, an engineer who worked for 25 years as a technical expert with the EPA’s underground injection program in Washington. “A lot of people are going to get sick, and a lot of people may die.”

Another aspect to what I call “energy desperation”, in the sense of being willing (now) to put aside concerns for life quality to obtain energy: The 2005 Federal Energy Appropriations Bill which exempts the gas industry from compliance with:

– The Clean Water Act

– The Safe Drinking Water Act

– The Clean air Act

– The Superfund (CERCLA) Act

The last implying they can dump as much toxic crap as they want and there’ll be no “toxic release inventory'” to assay it, and hence, no need to ever clean it up. If this isn’t desperation, what is? The willingness to put our future health as a nation in dire risk to satisfy immediate energy demands – mainly to dredge whatever low EROEI (energy returned on energuy invested) sources from the ground since the high EROEI oil has peaked.

More signs of desperation in the western states, such as Colorado: According to a Denver Post report on the results of an analysis by the Western Resource Associates (WRA), “Colorado’s oil and gas drilling consumes enough water to sustain 79,000 households for a year- enough for a medium sized city.”

This despite the fact the state has been in the throes of drought for years (though the severity has waxed and waned) and now is as bad as it was in 2002, with wildfires occupying more land than the whole Florida panhandle. But how is our water being used? On oil drilling and fracking!

According to WRA, between 22,100 and 39,500 acre-feet are pumped into the ground each year for drilling wells and hydraulic fracturing to coax out oil and gas. Tens of thousands of wells now dot the Colorado countryside. Meanwhile, farmers in the state barely have sufficient water to bring one crop to market far less all of them.. (As much as 5 million gallons of water can be injected into a single fracking well, of which 200,000 is laden with carcinogenic toxins such as benzene, so the water can’t be re-used.)

Pair this with the earlier use of corn (a food crop) for ethanol, and you have the makings of an energy desperation syndrome of epic proportions. But hardly anyone hears of the extent of it or the harm done…

This is what I and others call the Third-Worldization of America as we descend the net energy cliff of peak oil. We start using the harder to extract, dirtier stuff like tar sands, deep water oil, and gas fracking:

The formula for making Canada and the U.S. the “Saudi Arabia” of the twenty-first century is grim but relatively simple: environmental protections will have to be eviscerated and those who stand in the way of intensified drilling, from landowners to local environmental protection groups, bulldozed out of the way.  Put another way, North America will have to be Third-Worldified…

Has any American bothered to look at how our energy hungry lifestyles have left the environment in the Third World? That’s what happens when mass consumerism is coupled with unfettered free-market capitalism devoid of regulation. If you missed it, Obama recently opened the gates for the oil companies to drill in the Antarctic:

President Barack Obama personally helped Shell obtain authorization to drill for oil in Alaska, according to a 4,678 word front page article in the New York Times. This is a startling break from decades long U.S. policy which regarded the environment in the Arctic region too fragile to tamper with…

Someone at the Oildrum once said that our planet will look like it’s been denuded and scavenged by a swarm of hungry locusts when humans are done with it. That seems to be an apt description at the rate we are going trying to prolong the impossible. To put another more devious twist on this situation, we now have privately owned water companies partnering up with the fracking industry in order to profit off the exorbitant amount of water those drillers need to perform their nasty business:

…The water companies — American Water and Aqua America — are leading drinking water suppliers in Pennsylvania, where drilling is booming. They also sell water to gas companies — which use a drilling technique that requires massive amounts of water — and have expressed interest in treating drilling wastewater, a potentially lucrative opportunity.

These investor-owned, publicly traded water utility companies are also dues-paying “associate members” of the gas industry’s powerful Marcellus Shale Coalition, a fact confirmed by coalition spokesman Travis Windle, who says associate members pay $15,000 annually in dues. “Our associate members are really the backbone of the industry,” adds Windle…

…Aqua America is aggressively positioning itself to take advantage of what CEO Nick DeBenedictis has described to investors as a “water-energy nexus that could have a positive impact on the future of our company.” In recent years, the company has made sizeable acquisitions in Texas and Ohio – states that, like Pennsylvania, are home to large shale gas plays – and is also building a pipeline in Pennsylvania to supply water to drillers.

It’s not a good sign when a life-giving resource the public wants protected is owned by a company profiting from it. We then get perverse alliances like that described above in which the water company sees dollar signs when it looks at the profligate use of H2O by the fracking industry. You see, our capitalist system is not engineered to protect resources, but to maximize their consumption for the most profit possible, whether that be through people drinking it or the fracking industry pumping millions of gallons of water into the earth mixed with a witch’s brew of toxic chemicals. The for-profit water companies cannot be trusted to regulate themselves in regards to what is in the public’s best interests.

I’m glad that at least one state is smart enough to see the self-destruction of fracking and is strong enough to do something about it:

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Capitalism Cloaked in Corporate Greenwashing

23 Saturday Jun 2012

Posted by xraymike79 in Climate Change, Consumerism, Corporate State, Ecological Overshoot, Environmental Degradation, Neo-Colonialism, Pollution, Wall Street Fraud

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

Chris Williams, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Consumerism, Corporate State, Ecological Overshoot, Economic Growth, Environmental Collapse, Financial Elite, Globalization, Inverted Totalitarianism, John le Carré, Multinational Corporations, Neoliberal Capitalism, Poverty, Rio Earth Summit, The Elite 1%, United Nations, Wall Street Fraud

 …many of our official pronouncements – echoing those of most elite institutions and organizations – proudly and confidently insist that our future lies in “globalization.” Globalization – for lack of a better term – is, in actuality, the building out of a monoculture, a singular culture based upon basic presuppositions of modern political, economic and social theory.

Nature abhors monocultures. Nature abhors them so much that they do not exist in accordance with nature. They would be unknown but for modern man.

A monoculture is a single form of life – or, by extension, a single culture – that exists over a large expanse of space, even globally. Nature abhors monocultures because they are so susceptible to annihilation by one agent of destruction. In plant or animal life, for example, a single virus or bacteria, a single destructive fungus or disease, a single hostile predator or pest would wipe out an entire monoculture without the barest resistance. It is the very nature of nature to avoid monocultures – indeed, it cannot be otherwise since any form of monoculture cannot long exist in nature. Life in the natural realm is manifold and varied, precisely so that some life will weather the inevitable deadly challenges that arise. – Patrick J. Deneen

The following is an excellent essay by Chris Williams, a professor in the Dept of Chemistry & Physical Science, Pace University and author of Ecology and Socialism: Solutions to Capitalist Ecological Crisis (Haymarket Books, 2010). It goes well with my previous post on the corporatized Rio Earth Summit. In the last two decades only four out of ninety United Nation environmental sustainability pledges have been fulfilled, a pretty dismal failure by anyone’s standards. The four were: reducing ozone depletion, removing lead from gasoline, improving access to water supplies and boosting research for marine pollution. The reason for its epic failure is that the whole process of sustainability and scaling back ecologically destructive megatrends have been co-opted by our economic system, i.e. capitalism. The need for continuous growth and expansion into new markets is inherent in capitalism. It has come to define our culture and relationship with nature and our fellow man. As history has clearly shown, capitalism will be the death of us all if we allow this ethic-less system to define ourselves and to continue its rampant, unbridled destruction in the name of ‘development’ and profit.

A Tale of Two Conferences: The Social and Ecological Crises of Capitalism

Sometimes, the calendar of international conferences attended by global elites serves up potent lessons for the rest of us, when they shine a spotlight on the deliberately murky affairs of the people who run the system.  As the 20 most powerful world leaders deliberate on economic issues in Los Cabos, Mexico for the G20 summit, representatives of the rest will be simultaneously converging on Rio de Janeiro to consider how to follow up on the original Earth Summit, 20 years ago this year.

At these seemingly separate gatherings, we in truth observe the two sides of the capitalist coin.  Namely, how can the capitalist elite continue the necessary work of exploiting both humans and the natural world in the service of profit, while cloaking their intentions in the benign language of growth, development and sustainability?  Fine words to cover nefarious ends.  No doubt, as people’s livelihoods and world decay around them as a direct consequence of the system the elite oversee, and in response the flame of revolt is rekindled from Cairo to Athens, political elites in the two locations will reflect on the fact that it’s not getting any easier.  From the other side, critics and commentators of the two conferences are missing an important and significant lesson when they consider them in isolation.

At the original Earth Summit in Rio, it was generally accepted that environmental questions could not be separated from economic ones.  This year, the two conferences, occurring concurrently at different ends of the South American continent, bring to light how this thinking has been undermined.  Furthermore, they indicate with geographical and political precision where the priorities of the global elite lie.  While the most important world leaders hot-foot it to Mexico to discuss global economic development, they send low-level delegates to Brazil to discuss issues they deem less vital; to be exact, planetary ecological crisis.

Indeed, so desperate were the Brazilian organizers of Rio+20 to cajole the British premier to attend, they changed the date of the conference so as to avoid conflicting with the much more important and worthy 60th anniversary celebrations of the Queen of England’s ascension to the throne.  An attempt that proved ultimately and embarrassingly futile, as British Prime Minister, David Cameron, chose to cling to the coattails of President Obama and other G20 leaders in Los Cabos, as they calculate, connive and concoct the further dismemberment and disenfranchisement of communities of workers and peasants around the world.

In a further sad irony, to enhance attendance at Rio, Brazil is providing flights courtesy of the Brazilian air-force to those countries too poor to send delegates.  It’s hard to imagine that the countries who can’t afford to send delegates to an environmental conference will have the financial capacity to take action to preserve biodiversity and a stable climate without international funding and technology transfer.  But the concept or even use of the word “transfer” is exactly what the United States delegation is trying to excise from any document emerging from Rio+20.

In Los Cabos, 20 people wielding enormous economic power gather to ensure that nothing stands in the way of the international accumulation of money by their respective corporations; that capitalist growth continues, uninterrupted by paltry considerations such as democracy.  Scheming and plotting in Los Cabos, the 20 leaders will huddle, concerned that their plans have been exposed by the people of Greece.  As they jet to Mexico, one of the first countries to be devastated by the neoliberal prescription of privatization, deregulation and cuts to social spending, the election results in Greece ring in their ears as a collective rebuke to austerity and unemployment.  In unprecedented numbers, Greeks exercised their democratic rights by voting for a previously obscure and marginal left coalition, SYRIZA and against handing the welfare of their country over to unelected technocrats governing from afar.  A vote, it should be emphasized, carried out in the teeth of apocalyptic warnings of doom from central bank acolytes of the 1%, desperate to stop the people voting ‘the wrong way’.

As for the Global South, capitalist economic development, particularly since its neoliberal mutation, has been a disaster of gigantic proportions as money and natural wealth are siphoned into Western financial institutions.  According to Oxfam, gross capital flows to developing countries fell from $309 billion in 2010 to $170 billion in 2011.  Last year, aid donations from major donors experienced the first decrease in 14 years, dropping by $3.4 billion; overall aid was $16 billion below what the G8 committed to delivering in 2009.  The drop in aid, along with legal and illicit financial transfers out of the developing world, mean that for every dollar received in aid (much of it tied to the purchase of materials from the West), 7-10 dollars go out. In 2009 alone, the developing world saw $903 billion disappear overseas thanks to a rigged system from which the majority cannot benefit.  While 16 of the 20 members of the G20 have seen inequality increase over the last 20 years, as complement to that process, is it any wonder that developing countries seem to be permanently ‘developing’ even as social and ecological conditions there also worsen?

The violent dispossession that characterized the bloody dawn of capitalism captured by Marx in his writings on the enforced removal of peasants in the 1500’s amid the first acts of privatization – the land enclosures, is repeated in contemporary form through land grabs; his writing has a remarkably contemporary ring to it: “Thus were the agricultural people, first forcibly expropriated from the soil, driven from their homes, turned into vagabonds, and then whipped, branded, tortured by laws grotesquely terrible, into the discipline necessary for the wage system.”

In the 20 years since the optimism of the first Earth Summit in Rio, carbon emissions have increased by 50% and, since 1950, while the rest of the world has seen an average increase in temperature of 0.70C, the arctic, due to various positive feedback loops, has experienced double that.  Absent serious action, whereas the world is now on track for 20C of warming, the arctic is on course for a truly calamitous 3-60C.  The June 16th 2012 special edition of The Economist pondered an ice-free arctic with a mixture of trepidation, casual racist indifference and a general leaning toward monetary excitement: “In the long run the unfrozen north could cause devastation.  But, paradoxically, in the meantime, no arctic species will profit from it as much as the one causing it: humans.  Disappearing sea ice may spell the end of the last Eskimo cultures, but hardly anyone lives in an igloo these days anyway.  And the great melt is going to make a lot of people rich.”  Yes, to The Economist, while the change may be “devastating” to ancient and indigenous cultures, along with cold-adapted species, a certain small subset of humans will become rich while ‘making a killing’ – in all senses of the phrase.

We and the land have certainly changed and the continuation planned by the capitalists and their political representatives has unquestionably become impossible, as further capitalist development begins to contradict not just human rights or a sense of social progress, but the thermodynamic laws of the universe, which underpin a stable biosphere, upon which all life ultimately depends.

To quote British journalist George Monbiot on the reasons for the failure of so many environmental conferences, “These summits have failed for the same reason that the banks have failed. Political systems that were supposed to represent everyone now return governments of millionaires, financed by and acting on behalf of billionaires. The past 20 years have been a billionaires’ banquet. At the behest of corporations and the ultra-rich, governments have removed the constraining decencies – the laws and regulations – which prevent one person from destroying another. To expect governments funded and appointed by this class to protect the biosphere and defend the poor is like expecting a lion to live on gazpacho.”

From the other side of the political spectrum, representatives of the US environmental organization, Environmental Defense Fund, writing in a New York Times op-ed concede that “As the Arctic becomes ice-free, we can expect that it will be drilled for oil”.  But, nevertheless, despite two decades of failure, hold out hope that with just a little more effort and market reforms such as cap and trade, 10 years from now we’ll be okay “with determination and the right policies, by the time Rio+30 rolls around, optimism might be the order of the day.”

Now, socialists are often decried as Utopians.  We are told, our ideas may sound good in theory, but humans living equitably with one another in a democratic system based on cooperation, in a society that lives in harmony with the natural world, will simply never work in practice.  Is it more realistic to believe that the same system that got us to this point will extricate us?  The message from the ‘realists’ seems to be that while we may well have covered the arctic in drilling rigs by then, just give it another 10 years and things will be fine.  Going beyond the wrong-headed pronouncements of the EDF, UN Secretary-General, Ban Ki-moon managed a level of fervor that would have put Dr. Pangloss himself to shame, “Increasingly, we understand that, with smart public policies, governments can grow their economies, alleviate poverty, create decent jobs and accelerate social progress in a way that respects the earth’s finite natural resources.”

One has to ask, who are the real Utopians?  To many people around the world, leftwing and explicitly socialist ideas, along with class-based revolt, are re-emerging as real alternatives precisely because our rulers quite clearly have no answer other than an extension of the market into whole new areas.  Meena Raman of the Malaysia-based Third World Network, was unequivocal in her denunciation of the US’s role in derailing climate negotiations in Durban in 2002 and in Rio+20: “Given the US stance, we do not want President Obama or any US leader to come to Rio to bury what was agreed in 1992 in Rio. We cannot expect the US to show any leadership in truly wanting to save the planet and the poor. So it is better for President Obama to stay at home.”

Meanwhile, 105 scientific institutions are urging action at Rio on population and consumption “For too long population and consumption have been left off the table due to political and ethical sensitivities. These are issues that affect developed and developing nations alike, and we must take responsibility for them together,” said Charles Godfray, a fellow of the Royal Society.  Except that population growth is a function of poverty and it is in fact the countries with the largest levels of consumption, such as the United States and Europe, that not only are the historical cause of the ecological crisis, but are helping to drive it to its logical conclusion – a cascading collapse of ecosystems – by advocating continual economic expansion and the generation of poverty through the promotion of financial and trade agreements that accentuate inequality.  Capitalism is like a shark; just as these animals can never stop moving forward for fear of drowning, so capitalism must grow or die.

It’s important to understand why negotiators see the primary way to save the environment is through putting a price on it.  This is the main thrust of the talks and accepted by all negotiating parties inside the conference, representing a major schism with the tens of thousands of protesters attending the Rio+20 People’s Summit who are being forcibly kept out of the deliberations by armed riot police.

The argument goes that only by giving natural resources “value” in monetary terms can the environment be protected.  On the one hand, it’s easy to see the further privatization of every molecule of water, every tree and every piece of land as dovetailing beautifully with the desires of the corporations.  Extending the “free” market to new areas for exploitation is a tried and true method to enhance profits.   Those who run the corporations are not slow to catch on and self-advocate: “For companies this is enlightened self interest…Those who can afford water should pay. Water is essentially over exploited because we are not valuing it as an economic good. Introducing methodologies such as escalating tariffs, which some countries have already done, will help in terms of using water intelligently, often for the first time.” So said, Gavin Power, deputy director of the UN Global Compact, which is acting as an umbrella group for 45 of the most powerful CEO’s, from such well-known environmentally conscious concerns as Coca Cola, Glaxo-SmithKline, Nestle, Merck and Bayer, to ensure their voice is heard at Rio+20.

But advocacy for the “valuation” of natural resources occurs not just or even primarily because it coincides with what corporations want.  Many of the people arguing for such quantization of nature genuinely believe it will help preserve biodiversity, slow climate change and reduce the pressure on natural resources.

More fundamentally, the need to place “fair value” on everything is part of the ideological foundation of capitalism.  Within the philosophy of capitalism, if something does not have a price, it cannot have value.  Hence, putting the correct price, otherwise known as internalizing the cost, of a natural good, is to make possible its rational exploitation and simultaneous conservation.  To those mired deep within the labyrinth of a capitalistic value system, there is no contradiction between these two aims: the commodification of nature can be seen both as a way of making money from it, and as a way of saving it, as perfectly expressed by Ban Ki-moon.

The quantification of nature is the rational end-point of capitalism’s philosophical approach to nature and hence a practical approach to ‘saving nature’.  The non-quantifiable, qualitative side of nature, the purely spiritual and awe-inducing beauty of watching a sunrise for example, is not only entirely absent, or under-appreciated, it is essentially unknowable.  Hence, assuming you’re not prepared to advocate regulatory reforms to place limits on the operation of corporations and boundaries beyond which they cannot cross, or you’re not advocating revolution, then extending the market becomes the only option left, consequently the focus at Rio+20 on doing exactly that.

However, for those of us who truly want to see a better world, the extension of its commodification to every single particle of nature cannot be an answer.  Taking our inspiration from the rising struggles of 2011 around the globe, it is imperative that we link up the movements of social resistance, and forge new alliances with organized labor and the disenfranchised of the planet to force regulatory changes onto those who would foist false solutions on us.  Only by linking social and ecological change and fighting on both fronts, autonomous of mainstream political parties, while creating our own independent battle organizations, can we hope to make progress.

Ultimately, however, it is just as vital that fighters for social emancipation, human freedom and ecological sanity, recognize that capitalism represents the annihilation of nature and, thus, humanity.  A system based on cooperation, real democracy, long-term planning, and production for need not profit, i.e., socialism, represents the reconciliation of humanity with nature.  And its achievement will, as Marx pointed out, of necessity be much less violent than the process by which capitalism was born in the first place:

“The transformation of scattered private property, arising from individual labor, into capitalist private property is, naturally, a process, incomparably more protracted, violent, and difficult, than the transformation of capitalistic private property, already practically resting on socialized production, into socialized [common] property.  In the former case, we had the expropriation of the mass of the people by a few usurpers; in the latter, we have the expropriation of a few usurpers by the mass of the people.”

We currently live in an age that has been characterized as the Anthropocene, the Age of Man, by some scientists to take into account how drastically human civilization has altered the biosphere on a geological time scale.  Only by overthrowing capitalism and moving toward a cooperative, planned economy based on democracy and sustainability can we move toward an age characterized, after Epicurus, as the Oikeiotocene – The Age of Conformity to Nature.


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Rio+20 Summit: the Denial of Reality in the Name of the Free Market

22 Friday Jun 2012

Posted by xraymike79 in Climate Change, Consumerism, Corporate State, Ecological Overshoot, Environmental Degradation, Inequality, Neo-Colonialism, Pollution

≈ 3 Comments

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Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Corporate State, Danny Chivers, Ecological Overshoot, Economic Collapse, Economic Growth, Environmental Collapse, IMF, Neoliberal Capitalism, Overpopulation, Resource Wars, Rio+20 Summit, Social Injustice, The People Summit, Transnational Corporations, United Nations, WTO

The following article is perhaps the most important one I have posted thus far on ‘Collapse of Industrial Civilization’ because it gets at the root cause from which all the global crises have emerged, threatening not only the mass extinction of all flora and fauna, but also mankind’s own annihilation. This is the final act in the tragedy of the commons and it’s capitalism’s last gasp to commodify the rest of the planet for GDP growth, profits and the externalization of costs onto communities and the environment. There can be no price tag put on ecosystems because they are a finite entity priceless to the existence of life as we know it. But this is what is being created by the profit-at-any-cost transnational corporations in a so-called ‘green economy’ and its ‘sustainable development’. We can see this in the global land grab that was discussed in my post Hydro-Colonialism.

The Church of the Almighty Free Market is sending out its missionaries to ensure that neoliberal capitalism extracts the last bit of life from a ravaged planet teetering on the verge of ecological bankruptcy. If you want the unvarnished, non-commercialized report of the Rio Earth Summit, go here.

Big business goes to Rio – Climate and Capitalism

The upcoming Rio Earth Summit gives us a window into a fierce battle for the future of global environmental action. Danny Chivers explains what it’s all about.

 
Many people don’t even know it’s happening. But from 20-22 June more than a hundred heads of state, along with an estimated 50,000 representatives from businesses, NGOs, trades unions, local government and others will gather in Rio de Janeiro for the 2012 UN Earth Summit.

The conference’s official website makes it look like a friendly gathering of world leaders and other ‘stakeholders’ from business and civil society. However, underneath the surface layer of polite discussion documents and optimistic press releases, a battle is raging.

Harmless-sounding phrases like ‘green economy’ and ‘sustainable development’ have become grounds for bitter dispute, as different governments and business interests attempt to redefine these terms to meet their own agenda.

Like a door that swings unexpectedly open to reveal a family squabble, the 2012 Rio Summit gives us a glimpse of an argument that’s been rumbling away largely out of the public eye – an argument about the future direction of intergovernmental environmental action.

This year’s event is commonly referred to as Rio+20 as it falls exactly two decades after the famous 1992 Earth Summit in the same city. That earlier UN conference is often cited as a key moment in the history of environmental politics: it established the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, the Convention on Biological Diversity, the Rio Declaration and Agenda 21.

The price of everything

While these measures contained many fine words and good ideas, they didn’t have much regulatory force behind them and relied on voluntary actions by governments, business and civil society.

This row of well-meaning policy sandcastles have spent the past 20 years being eaten away by a rising tide of fundamentalist free-market economics, unfettered financial speculation, and consolidated corporate power.

As a result, any environmental and social gains from the first Rio summit look small next to the destruction wrought by a voracious corporate sector and by governments obsessed with growth in GDP before all else.

Global inequality has increased, natural habitats have been degraded and climate talks have been stalled by a mix of corporate lobbying and self-interested political horse-trading.

Much of this has been done by companies and politicians under the banner of ‘sustainable development’ – sustainable in this case meaning ‘able to keep making money into the future’.

A shift to a genuinely sustainable society will require us to challenge these negative forces, rein in the excesses of corporations and markets, and build an entirely different economy based on wellbeing for the many rather than profits for the few.

But Rio+20 shows little sign of achieving this. It could make things worse. The preparatory Green Economy Report launched by the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) in 2011 provoked outrage among NGOs by focusing on market-based and technological responses to the environmental crisis, rather than the underlying economic and political causes.

Silvia Ribeiro from the campaign group ETC Mexico points out: ‘Collapsing financial markets in Northern countries mean that banks and other investors are now looking desperately for new areas of expansion and speculation. We can see these desires leaving their mark on the Rio+20 process. The “Green Economy” now under discussion would unleash a wave of risky but lucrative new technologies such as synthetic biology, nanotechnology and climate technofixes. This isn’t about finding the best environmental solutions: it’s about creating profitable new investments.’

Another key theme of the 2011 UNEP report – which had investment banker Pavan Sukdhev as a lead author – was that placing a financial value on natural systems, cycles and habitats would allow markets to price them properly, and thus prevent them from being degraded.

Large polluting industries… like mafia bosses invited to a meeting on reducing gang violence

This approach has broad support from many Northern governments and institutions like the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, but has set off alarm bells elsewhere.

Thomas Barlow from the World Development Movement says: ‘The global market is a fundamental part of the problem. Through its quest for never-ending growth, it helps to drive our insatiable appetite for the things – like clean air, water, biodiversity – that nature provides.

‘Protection of these cannot be left in the hands of this market – we cannot afford to live in a world where ecosystems are protected if, and only if, there is more profit to be made by protecting them than by trashing them.

‘Protection of natural systems will only happen through bringing the market under control, not by giving it yet more power over nature.’

Unacknowledged power

What price a gliding treefrog in the costing of ‘eco-system services’ that the Rio+20 process seems to be heading towards?

How has this controversial vision of the green economy crept into the Rio+20 process? Part of the problem is that the UN is attempting to figure out a global governance system that would prevent environmental destruction, but is allowing those most responsible for that destruction to claim a disproportionate voice within the process. Large polluting industries, business lobby groups and financial institutions are welcomed in as well-meaning ‘stakeholders’ – like mafia bosses invited to a meeting on reducing gang violence.

While the UN’s stated commitment to dialogue and consensus is laudable, the process fails to acknowledge the imbalances of power that allow the wealthiest governments to wield greater influence within the negotiations, while small farmers, indigenous groups, and other representatives of affected communities are given token representation but largely ignored.

The businesses with the most wealth and power are those that have flourished in an economy based on the unrestricted use of natural resources and the exploitation of many of the world’s people. Those with the most to lose from a shift to true sustainability are therefore those with the most power to block that change. Some, like South African petrochemical giant Sasol, influence the UN process through cosy relationships with national governments. Some, like Brazilian miner Vale, muscle in on civil society networks and influence their input in the Rio process. Still others work via lobbying organizations such as the International Emissions Trading Association. Meanwhile, industry groups, like the World Business Council for Sustainable Development, have had an organizing role within the various Rio+20 pre-meetings.

this kind of research accepts and reinforces the terms laid down for us by the existing system – the idea that nothing can be valued unless it has a price tag

The scientific community has also been getting increasingly vocal. A major conference called Planet Under Pressure brought together almost 3,000 scientists in London in March, with the aim of giving some stark warnings and policy advice to politicians in the run-up to Rio. The ‘State of the Planet’ declaration issued from the conference didn’t mince its words: ‘Research now demonstrates that the continued functioning of the Earth system as it has supported the wellbeing of human civilization in recent centuries is at risk… creating the potential for a humanitarian emergency on a global scale.’

The accompanying policy papers recognized the need for social change and better environmental governance, not just more technology. Useful concepts like planetary boundaries and the ‘Inclusive Wealth Index’ (an alternative to GDP) were presented, and speakers from the stage spoke repeatedly for the need for a ‘paradigm shift’ in society.

However, there was little acknowledgement of what this would mean in practice, that there are powerful interests working against such a shift and that they will need to be challenged. Instead, the general plan seemed to be just to keep on telling people about the problem and hoping that good folks from across society will agree to work together to fix it – including the big corporations.

The waters were particularly muddy in the discussions around ‘valuing ecosystem services’. Researchers have been assessing the monetary value of crucial environmental services such as the water-filtering properties of wetlands, in order to explain to policymakers just how much would be lost by damaging or destroying them. For example, the Stockholm Environment Institute calculated that the economic value of the oceans could be reduced by up to $2 trillion per year if climate change is left unchecked.

These studies are doubtless carried out with the best of intentions and may help to protect some ecosystems in the short term. However, they could also represent a dangerous first step towards the ‘costing’ of ecosystem services for trade on the open market. Rather than seeking that much-vaunted paradigm shift, this kind of research accepts and reinforces the terms laid down for us by the existing system – the idea that nothing can be valued unless it has a price tag.

Timid monstrosity

Of course, scientists aren’t a lab-coated homogeneous mass. Nor are activists all of one mind. Some NGOs and civil society groups have fully engaged with the Rio+20 process, sending submissions into the draft document and delegates to the meetings; others have preferred to spend their time mobilizing people elsewhere, including at a parallel People’s Summit which will take place in Rio during the UN talks. Many are pursuing a dual strategy, both inside and outside the talks.

However, most are united in their criticism of the draft declaration that’s been put together so far – the ‘outcome document’ that governments will sign up to at the end of Rio+20. An initial 19-page ‘zero draft’ document was launched in January as a starting point for discussion. It contained no binding resolutions of any kind, just a wish-list of voluntary actions that business and government would be ‘encouraged’ to take, and lots of mentions of a poorly defined ‘green economy’.

In response, civil society and industry groups put forward their own suggested amendments. Environmental campaigners, indigenous peoples and Southern farmers’ groups called for major changes; meanwhile, the business lobby were generally happy with the document, asking for adjustments like the removal of references to technology transfer and the role of small farmers.

Governments – often grouped into ‘blocs’ – then submitted formal amendments to the draft, with suggested additions and removals. These suggestions swelled the document from 19 to over 150 pages, reflecting the level of disagreement involved. Derek Osborn of the Stakeholder Forum has described the new draft as a ‘monstrosity’ full of ‘timidity, caution, suspicion, protection of vested interests, and even attempts to undermine and go backward on rights, actions and issues already agreed.’

Groups like the Indigenous Environmental Network (IEN) and La Via Campesina are calling for a very different Rio+20 agreement based on respect for people’s rights to land, food and clean water. Tom Goldtooth, Executive Director of IEN, said: ‘Systems such as “payment for ecological services” and using forests in carbon offset markets do nothing but make Mother Earth into the World Trade Organization of nature.’ He stated that Indigenous Peoples from around the world would be coming together at Rio to ‘oppose an agenda based on the privatization and commodification of nature’. Campaigners like theETC Group are calling for proper technology assessment measures to be built in to any agreement, before untested geo-engineering and synthetic biology techniques are unleashed in the name of the green economy.

Quite how all of this will be boiled down into any kind of coherent final statement remains to be seen. However it emerges, the new Rio declaration will give us a snapshot of where we’re at with these crucial debates, and how far we still need to go.

Moving forwards

On a more positive note, Rio+20 has been a good opportunity to raise the profile of some interesting and potentially useful sustainability ideas. It’s also helped to bring together disparate groups and build important new alliances. For example, an international pre-Rio+20 conference organized by the Central Workers of Argentina reinforced alliances between trades unions and environmental movements. According to Lucia Ortiz of Friends of the Earth Brazil: ‘Trades Unions are getting very concerned about the “green economy” agenda, because it represents a deepening of neoliberal policies, and threatens to undermine the social rights already secured by past struggles. They are working in solidarity with environmentalists, indigenous peoples, farmers and women’s rights activists, calling instead for a transition to a sustainable and just society free from the exploitation of workers and of nature.’

The best thing to come out of Rio+20 could be the strengthening of social movements in opposition to one of its core ideas. The false green economy’s grand Brazilian showcase might just be the event that helps to trigger its downfall.

Danny Chivers is the author of The No-Nonsense Guide to Climate Change: The Science, the solutions, the way forward (New Internationalist, 2010)

See also: Danny’s Radio NI interview on Rio+20 and greenwashing

In our latest podcast Danny Chivers talks about how environmental criminals are attempting to hijack Rio+20, and what we as citizens and activists can do to stop them.

Note: The People Summit held dialogues outside of the UN participation structure and published ‘Another Future is Possible’ in direct opposition to the orientations the UN negociators have been taking in the past few months. Their position: the green economy as defined in the negociations deepens “the commodification, privatization, and financialization of nature and its functions. It is a reaffirmation of full control of the entire biosphere by the economy” and is to be rejected.

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Licking the Boots of a Financial Oligarch and Criminal

21 Thursday Jun 2012

Posted by xraymike79 in Corporate State, Peak Oil, Wall Street Fraud

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Charles Ferguson, Credit Default Swap, Derivatives, Ellen Brown, Federal Reserve, Global Economic Collapse, James Howard Kunstler, Jamie Dimon, JP Morgan, Peak Oil, Predator Nation, Senate Banking Committee, Sock-Puppet Politician, U.S. Senate

“Over the last thirty years, the United States has been taken over by an amoral financial oligarchy, and the American dream of opportunity, education, and upward mobility is now largely confined to the top few percent of the population. Federal policy is increasingly dictated by the wealthy, by the financial sector, and by powerful (though sometimes badly mismanaged) industries such as telecommunications, health care, automobiles, and energy. These policies are implemented and praised by these groups’ willing servants, namely the increasingly bought-and-paid-for leadership of America’s political parties, academia, and lobbying industry.” – Charles Ferguson – Predator Nation

The way that ‘our’ representatives fawned over Jamie Dimon at the Senate hearings on his derivatives gambling loss was the subject of a recent piece by Matt Taibbi. As one Daily Kos commenter put it, he was surprised one of the senators “didn’t crawl under Dimon’s chair and stroke him with the Invisible Hand of the Free Market.” But as journalist Ellen Brown explains, the answer is deeper than the mere fact that JP Morgan is the biggest campaign donor to many members of the Banking Committee. JPM’s derivatives are propping up US debt:

…financial analysts Jim Willie and Rob Kirby think it may be something far larger, deeper, and more ominous.  They contend that the $3 billion-plus losses in London hedging transactions that were the subject of the hearing can be traced, not to European sovereign debt (as alleged), but to the record-low interest rates maintained on U.S. government bonds.

The national debt is growing at $1.5 trillion per year.  Ultra-low interest rates MUST be maintained to prevent the debt from overwhelming the government budget.  Near-zero rates also need to be maintained because even a moderate rise would cause multi-trillion dollar derivative losses for the banks, and would remove the banks’ chief income stream, the arbitrage afforded by borrowing at 0% and investing at higher rates.

The low rates are maintained by interest rate swaps, called by Willie a “derivative tool which controls the bond market in a devious artificial manner.”  How they control it is complicated, and is explored in detail in the Willie piece here and Kirby piece here.

Kirby contends that the only organization large enough to act as counterparty to some of these trades is the U.S. Treasury itself.  He suspects the Treasury’s Exchange Stabilization Fund, a covert entity without oversight and accountable to no one. Kirby also notes that if publicly-traded companies (including JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs, and Morgan Stanley) are deemed to be integral to U.S. national security (meaning protecting the integrity of the dollar), they can legally be excused from reporting their true financial condition.  They are allowed to keep two sets of books.

Interest rate swaps are now over 80 percent of the massive derivatives market, and JPMorgan holds about $57.5 trillion of them.  Without the protective JPMorgan swaps, interest rates on U.S. debt could follow those of Greece and climb to 30%.  CEO Dimon could, then, indeed be “the guy in charge”: he could be controlling the lever propping up the whole U.S. financial system.

Talk about a house of cards built on sand!!! It’s one big gambling casino using worthless monopoly money!

 

Kunstler discusses the massive mountain of lies and fiction surrounding our world of fraudulent finance and the danger it poses to our civilization in the age of peak oil:

 

The world is heading for a “lower standard of living,” and the only question is “how disorderly will that process be.”

 

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Who really pulls the strings?:

The megawealthy and Washington have become so symbiotic as to be a single entity. The bought-and-paid politicians sitting in Washington are simply the marionettes of the corporations and financial elite who are dictating public policy and regulations.

Preserving the Status Quo

There is no right wing or left wing, only the aristocracy and the serfs (a vertical paradigm). To know this is to be like a fish who has broken the surface of the water, realizing he was in water the whole time.

A Kabuki Play

"What we have, in what passes for US democracy in 2012, is a kabuki play that Cicero put to papyrus 1948 years earlier. All historical empires and war aggressors have used propaganda to claim their looting and police states were necessary and helpful to the 99%. Instead, a sorrowful history tells us they were almost always for the sole benefit of the 1%." - Albert Bates

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  • 'Conspiracy Theories' and Clandestine Politics
  • (2019) UN Report: Nature’s Dangerous Decline ‘Unprecedented’; Species Extinction Rates ‘Accelerating’
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  • English version of German military peak oil study
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  • Imagining the Post-Antibiotics Future
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  • Life as a Manifestation of the Second Law of Thermodynamics
  • Living Dangerously: Stories of Climate Change
  • Living for the Moment while Devaluing the Future
  • Lloyd's adds its voice to dire 'peak oil' warnings
  • Looking Back on the 'Limits to Growth'
  • MARY BOOTH ON THE MYTH OF “GREEN” ENERGY FROM WOOD
  • Michael E. Mann
  • Mysterious Siberian Crater Found at "End of the World" May Portend Methane Climate Catastrophe
  • NATURAL CAPITAL AT RISK: THE TOP 100 EXTERNALITIES OF BUSINESS
  • Natural Law
  • Natural Way of Farming Masanobu – Fukuoka Green Philosophy
  • Nature’s Laws No Longer Apply…
  • Net Energy and The Economy
  • New scientific study predicts that plastic pollution and toxic chemical-induced ocean acidification will cause a trophic cascade collapse of the entire marine ecosystem, destroying human society within the next 25 years.
  • NOAA & U.S. Geological Survey Interactive Sea Level Rise Map (up to 25 ft)
  • Noam Chomsky on human extinction: The corporate elite are actively courting disaster
  • Oil and gas industry using military psyops techniques to reduce opposition to fracking
  • OilCrash.com
  • On Human Nature
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  • Peak Energy, Climate Change, and the Collapse of Global Civilization
  • Peak Oil – A Turning Point for Mankind by Dr. Colin J. Campbell
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  • Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter planet, by Mark Lynas
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  • The Discovery of Global Warming
  • The End of Growth, Seven Years Later
  • The Entropy Law and the Economic Process
  • The evolution and psychology of self-deception
  • The Final Empire THE COLLAPSE OF CIVILIZATION
  • The Final Empire: THE COLLAPSE OF CIVILIZATION
  • The Free Press
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  • The Gore Vidal Pages
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  • The human brain is in Denial.
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  • The Last Great Global Warmıng
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  • THE POPULATION PROBLEM AND SOCIALISM
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  • The Story of Phosphorus: 7 reasons why we need to transform phosphorus use in the global food system
  • The Temptation of The Technofix (The Quest for “New Nature”)
  • The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming
  • There Is No "Green" Energy
  • Thomas Homer-Dixon
  • Tilting at Windmills, Spain’s disastrous attempt to replace fossil fuels with Solar Photovoltaics
  • Tipping Towards the Unknown
  • Too many bodies? The return and disavowal of the population question
  • Trade-Off: Financial system supply-chain cross contagion – a study in global systemic collapse
  • Twenty Premises on Industrial Civilization from Derrick Jensen
  • Twenty-First Century Collapse
  • Underminers: A Practical Guide to Radical Change
  • We Are All Madoffs
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  • What Evolution Is?
  • Who Rules America: An Investment Manager's View on the Top 1%
  • Who Rules America: Wealth, Income, and Power
  • Why shale gas won’t end our energy woes
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  • Why won't planting trees stop global warming?
  • Zygmunt Bauman

RSS 3 Quarkes Daily

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RSS A Prosperous Way Down

  • A really inconvenient truth August 25, 2019
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RSS Adam Curtis Blog

  • SAVE YOUR KISSES FOR ME November 30, 2012
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RSS Aljazeera – Opinion

  • Libyan rival PM leaves Tripoli after clashes between forces May 17, 2022
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  • Dozens injured in Israeli police attack on Palestinian funeral May 17, 2022
  • Indian insurer LIC slides in market debut after record IPO May 17, 2022
  • Ethiopia to get $300m World Bank grant for reconstruction May 17, 2022
  • Photos: Ukrainian medics battle to save lives as casualties mount May 17, 2022

RSS All Tied Up and Nowhere to Go

  • Jesse Jackson on poverty September 17, 2020
  • Quote of the day September 12, 2020
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  • Thomas Ferguson discusses our situation September 7, 2020
  • This way doth dictatorship lie September 1, 2020

RSS Alternative Radio

  • [Katrina vanden Heuvel] Russia, Ukraine, the War & the U.S. May 12, 2022

RSS AlterNet

  • Analysis warns Trump DOJ is casting a long shadow over Biden admin May 17, 2022
  • Far-right Arizona lawmaker under investigation after controversial remarks on Buffalo shooting May 17, 2022
  • Why India will be a key player in the emerging New World Order May 17, 2022
  • A 'recipe for quid pro quo corruption': Elena Kagan torches Monday's SCOTUS ruling in blistering dissent May 17, 2022

RSS Ambrose Evans-Pritchard

  • Cabinet minister ‘surprised’ by Andrew Bailey’s ‘apocalyptic’ food price warning - live updates May 17, 2022
  • Twitter deal is dead without proof of fake accounts, warns Elon Musk May 17, 2022
  • Lowest unemployment since 1974 threatens to push inflation higher May 17, 2022
  • Bank of England warns of 'apocalyptic' global food shortage May 16, 2022
  • Elon Musk suggests he could pay a lower price for Twitter May 16, 2022

RSS Anarchist News

  • System Fail 11: Lamborghinis and Tear Gas May 17, 2022
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  • Greece: Thanos Xatziagkelou – ‘Don’t ask if we will win or be defeated – War!’ May 16, 2022
  • How to write letters to prisoners in Belarus so that they reach them? May 16, 2022

RSS Antony Loewenstein

  • Will the Australian election give voice to Palestinians? May 12, 2022
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RSS Arctic Emergency Institute

  • Declining Summer Sea Ice Threatens More than Arctic Wildlife August 25, 2012

RSS Arctic Methane Emergency Group (AMEG)

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  • The biggest story of all time September 1, 2012

RSS Arctic News

  • Carbon dioxide reaches another record high May 16, 2022
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RSS Arctic Sea Ice

  • PIOMAS December 2019 December 17, 2019
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RSS Arctic Sea Ice News & Analysis

  • Springtime in the Arctic May 3, 2022
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RSS Around the Coast Mountains

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RSS Arthur Silber

  • Moving Interruptus, and Why Hospitals Suck July 1, 2019
  • Crisis May 16, 2019
  • How Many Damn Fucking Times Do I Have to Explain This? May 15, 2019
  • So Close, Yet So Far April 7, 2019

RSS Arundhati Roy

  • This is no ordinary spying. Our most intimate selves are now exposed | Arundhati Roy July 26, 2021
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RSS Arundhati Roy Says

  • A perfect day for democracy February 9, 2013
  • Arundhati Roy speaks about the issue of rape in India December 22, 2012
  • We Call This Progress December 17, 2012

RSS ASPO – USA

  • The Energy Bulletin Weekly – 13 April 2020 April 13, 2020
  • The Energy Bulletin Weekly – 6 April 2020 April 6, 2020
  • The Energy Bulletin Weekly – 30 March 2020 March 30, 2020
  • Peak-Oil.org is now The Energy Bulletin March 24, 2020
  • Peak Oil Review – 23 March 2020 March 23, 2020
  • Peak Oil Review – 16 March 2020 March 16, 2020
  • Peak Oil Review – 9 March 2020 March 9, 2020
  • Peak Oil Review – 2 March 2020 March 3, 2020
  • Peak Oil Review – 24 February 2020 February 24, 2020
  • Peak Oil Review – 17 February 2020 February 18, 2020

RSS Avedon’s Sideshow

  • We're in for nasty weather May 14, 2022
  • 'Cause I couldn't stand the pain April 30, 2022
  • Play it right and bide my time April 14, 2022

RSS Bad Astronomy

  • How Storytelling Became a Product
  • The Only Thing Worse Than a Bad Job…
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RSS BBC: Science & Environment

  • Farm machinery exacting heavy toll on soil - study May 17, 2022
  • Full lunar eclipse creates rare super blood Moon May 16, 2022
  • How much plastic do you use in a week? May 12, 2022

RSS Big Picture Agriculture

  • BIG PICTURE AGRICULTURE'S LATEST NEWS February 26, 2022
  • How to Stay Informed About Agriculture, Food, and Farming Issues October 15, 2019
  • Dr. Walter Falcon's 2019 Iowa Farm Report September 11, 2019
  • Agriculture Reading Picks October 31, 2018
  • The Merits of Amaranth October 30, 2018

RSS Bill Moyers

  • Trump-Russia-Ukraine Timeline April 12, 2022
  • Insurrection Timeline March 13, 2022
  • Juneteenth: America’s Other Independence Day April 20, 2021

RSS Bit Tooth Energy

  • Waterjetting 37e - Using Cavitation to disintegrate rock November 18, 2015
  • Waterjetting 37d - Underground Drilling with Waterjets November 16, 2015
  • Waterjetting 37c - A Drilling Diversion October 14, 2015

RSS Bizarro Blog

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RSS Brane Space

  • Durham's Sham Trial & The WSJ Trolls Cheering Him On As They Lie About The "Russia Hoax" May 16, 2022
  • An Introduction To Differential Geometry (Part 4) May 13, 2022

RSS Brave New World

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RSS Breaking the Set

  • Abby Martin Breaks the Set One Last Time February 28, 2015
  • Never Stop Breaking the Set! February 28, 2015
  • Cuba Part III: The Evolution of Revolution February 27, 2015
  • Cuba Part II: Ebola Solidarity & Castro’s Daughter on Gay Rights February 26, 2015
  • Why Are Americans Getting Their Medical Degrees in Cuba? February 26, 2015

RSS Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

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RSS Business Insider

  • Ukrainian man says he survived being tortured, shot in the face and buried alive by Russian soldiers May 17, 2022
  • 10 things before the opening bell May 17, 2022
  • SpaceX is selling shares at $125 billion valuation as Elon Musk rejigs Twitter financing, reports say May 17, 2022
  • UK won't 'shy away' from unilaterally changing Northern Ireland protocol, says minister, as government prepares plan May 17, 2022
  • Morgan Stanley says there is a 27% chance of a recession in the US in the next 12 months, up from 5% just two months ago May 17, 2022
  • 10 Things in Tech: Microsoft bumps pay May 17, 2022
  • EU sanctions against Russian oligarchs leave hundreds of workers jobless on Italian island, report says May 17, 2022
  • Ukraine evacuates steel plant soldiers and says it has stopped fighting in an apparent surrender of Mariupol May 17, 2022
  • Buffalo shooting suspect wasn't barred from purchasing firearms despite being reported under New York's red-flag law May 17, 2022
  • Singapore tech billionaire's wealth shrinks by 80% amid global tech selloff, poor earnings, and regulatory pressures from one of its most promising markets, report says May 17, 2022

RSS C-Realm

  • Automation and SJWs: A Conversation with James Howard Kunstler February 12, 2016
  • It's official. The Age of Limits gathering is on hiatus January 22, 2015
  • Three Conferences in Three Weeks June 13, 2014

RSS Cagle: Premium Cartoon News

  • The Twitter Deal May 16, 2022
  • Brazil Election May 16, 2022
  • GAS Price in USA May 16, 2022
  • Putin Nationalism May 16, 2022
  • Kevin McCarthy Subpoena May 16, 2022
  • Ukraine Eats Baby Starves May 16, 2022

RSS Cassandra’s Legacy

  • Cassandra is Dead. Long Live Cassandra! April 15, 2021
  • Ugo Bardi's Latest Post on "The Seneca Effect": The Collapse of Saudi Arabia's Water Supply April 12, 2021
  • Ugo Bardi's Latest Post on "The Seneca Effect" April 5, 2021
  • Ugo Bardi's Latest post on "The Seneca Effect" April 1, 2021
  • Ugo Bardi's latest post on "The Seneca Effect" March 29, 2021

RSS Censored News

  • Sisters in Defense of the Amazon Rainforest: Oil Companies Bring Terror to Ecuadorian Amazon May 17, 2022
  • Rights of Nature: Attorneys Describe Emerging Movement in Indian Country May 16, 2022
  • Nick Estes and Sikowis at Bioneers, Sunday, May 15, 2022 May 15, 2022

RSS Center For Biological Diversity

  • Lawsuit Challenges California Biofuel Refinery Expansion May 16, 2022
  • Legal Agreement Requires Federal Government to Update Marine Mammal Assessments May 16, 2022
  • Mexican Gray Wolf Rule Eliminates Cap on Population, Restricts Killing May 13, 2022

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RSS Charles Eisenstein’s Blog

  • Peace-building March 25, 2022
  • FASCHISMUS UND DAS ANTIFESTIVAL November 16, 2021

RSS Chomsky

  • The Kind of Anarchism I Believe in, and What's Wrong with Libertarians June 9, 2013
  • Upcoming speaking event in Boston with Noam Chomsky, Amy Goodman, and Jeremy Scahill April 19, 2013

RSS Chris Hedges

  • Imagining A New World on the Other Side of the Pandemic March 20, 2020

RSS Class Warfare Blog

  • How to Resolve the Abortion Issue May 16, 2022
  • There Are No Contradictions . . . May 16, 2022

RSS Cliff Schecter

  • Plan It Green: Extreme Heat May 17, 2022
  • Libyan rival PM leaves Tripoli after clashes between forces May 17, 2022
  • Zimbabwe unfreezes bank lending only days after policy change May 17, 2022
  • Photos: Waiting for water train in India’s scorching desert state May 17, 2022
  • Dozens injured in Israeli police attack on Palestinian funeral May 17, 2022
  • Indian insurer LIC slides in market debut after record IPO May 17, 2022

RSS Climate and Capitalism

  • IMF ‘double standard’ displays capitalism’s inherent inhumanity May 16, 2022
  • Ecosocialist Bookshelf, May 2022 May 9, 2022
  • How vested interests rewrote the IPCC’s latest report April 28, 2022
  • Darwin: ‘Commonsense and Wonder’ April 19, 2022
  • ‘Rain Bomb’ kills over 300 in South Africa, exposing political hypocrisy April 14, 2022
  • Ecosocialist Bookshelf, April 2022 April 10, 2022

RSS Climate Central

  • The looming threat for Maine’s iconic potato industry
  • Ellis Island, lighthouses among historic NJ sites flooding as seas rise
  • Still rare in Iowa, electric car powers Des Moines family’s home during blackouts
  • Storied Maine ski resort bets future on reining in high costs of warmer winters

RSS Climate Change: The Next Generation

  • Flip Flop: Why Variations in Earth's Magnetic Field Aren't Causing Today's Climate Change February 22, 2022
  • Let's call climate change deniers what they really are: CLIMATE LIARS! May 9, 2021
  • Amy Westerfelt: The Reason COVID-19 and Climate Seem So Similar: Disinformation April 27, 2020

RSS Climate Citizen

  • Carbon Credits & Offsets | Honest Government Ad April 16, 2022
  • Climate consideration case not to be appealed to High Court, but Students vow to keep pushing for climate action April 12, 2022
  • UN Secretary General calls out Australia: "the truly dangerous radicals increasing the production of fossil fuels" in launching IPCC WGIII report on climate solutions April 6, 2022

RSS Climate Code Red

  • 1.5 degrees Paris climate target not ‘safe or appropriate’ given climate tipping point risks, ‘major rethink’ required: new report May 16, 2022
  • Tullamarine’s dream of a third runway is an emissions nightmare May 4, 2022
  • Are renewables decreasing global fossil fuel use? May 3, 2022

RSS Climate Connections

  • Climate Connections Update February 5, 2015
  • CIC’s environmental and social justice photography contest open for entries January 9, 2015
  • FBI Harassing Activists in Pacific Northwest January 7, 2015

RSS Climate Denial Crock of the Week

  • John Oliver on America’s Electric Utilities May 16, 2022
  • Climate and Kids: They are Not OK With it May 16, 2022
  • With Inflation, Are Renewables Still Competitive? May 16, 2022

RSS Climate Progress

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RSS Climate Snapshot

  • "Carbon tsunami" lead by Enbridge Northern Gateway takes aim at BC June 18, 2014
  • BC's tar sands? Thirteen proposed LNG projects equivalent to 13 times current BC emissions June 9, 2014
  • Car Carbon series: cool new animation, plus the jaw-dropping impact it left out May 13, 2014
  • Climate change fuels both California's record drought and "polar vortex" storms May 6, 2014

RSS ClimateSight

  • Let’s hear more from the women who leave academia (Part 2) March 23, 2021
  • Let’s hear more from the women who leave academia. March 11, 2021
  • Talking, typing, and the social model of disability July 22, 2020

RSS Club Orlov

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RSS ClusterFuck Nation

  • Feeding the Narrative May 16, 2022
  • That Sinking Feeling May 13, 2022

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RSS Colin Tudge

  • Let's not bet the farm | Colin Tudge April 3, 2013
  • Why the world needs a renaissance of small farming | Colin Tudge September 18, 2012

RSS Common Dreams: News

  • Study Finds Many Existing Oil and Gas Sites Must Be Shut Down to Avert Climate Disaster May 17, 2022
  • 'Cancel It, Don't Means Test It!' Omar Says of Student Debt May 16, 2022
  • Trump DOJ Casting Long Shadow Over Biden Admin: Analysis May 16, 2022
  • 'Fueling the Flames': Model Shows Growing Risk of Wildfires in US May 16, 2022
  • Sentenced for Coal Blockade, Climate Activists Vow to 'Continue to Do What Must Be Done' May 16, 2022

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RSS CounterPunch

  • Less Freedom, More Money: Tony Blair’s Vaccine Passport June 14, 2021
  • The U.S. Dares to Criticize Israel October 3, 2014
  • Gaza – Betrayed In Thought and Deed August 5, 2014
  • Boeing Workers Take a Stand & Take the Heat December 31, 2013
  • Bank Corruption Down Under December 31, 2013
  • Europe’s Deadly Transition From Social Democracy to Oligarchy December 9, 2011
  • Pakistan Stares Into the Abyss December 29, 2007
  • Seeing in the Dark December 29, 2007
  • What We Can Not See December 29, 2007
  • The Sham of Homeland Security December 29, 2007

RSS Crooked Timber

  • Sunday photoblogging: Rose May 15, 2022
  • The Thirty-Nine Steps May 13, 2022
  • American history as imagined in liberal political philosophy May 9, 2022
  • Sunday photoblogging: Horse in a flooded field May 8, 2022

RSS Crooks and Liars

  • Coup Mobile - The Network Favored By Insurrectionists May 17, 2022
  • 'We Are Ascendant!' Defiant Steve Bannon Addresses Replacement Theory May 16, 2022
  • Op-Ed: The Pentagon Must Take UFO Hearings Seriously May 16, 2022
  • Alex Jones Repeats Right Wing Speculation Buffalo Shooter Was FBI Plant May 16, 2022

RSS Cryptome

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RSS Culture Change

  • Low Cost Polluting: The Real American Dream?
  • We Did It: Sailing Cargo in the Aegean
  • Cure for Depending on 90K Oil Spewing Cargo Ships: Sail Power Makes Inroads, Now in Mediterranean

RSS Dahr Jamail

  • For a Worse Tomorrow November 18, 2021
  • Covid-19’s Not Through With Us Yet September 21, 2021

RSS Daily Kos Comics

  • Cartoon: Goofball and Galahad May 16, 2022
  • Cartoon: Susan Collins's concerns May 13, 2022
  • Cartoon: Alito’s DIY Precedent Kit May 13, 2022
  • Cartoon: The Education of Louis - What a boring dance May 12, 2022
  • Cartoon: Not so welcome May 1, 2022
  • Cartoon: Arsenals May 11, 2022

RSS Damn the Matrix

  • Great Simplification with Tom Murphy May 11, 2022
  • House update 2022 May 11, 2022

RSS Dan Hagen

  • Dr. Strange on the Yellow Brick Road May 8, 2022
  • Wind Waves Their Ears May 6, 2022

RSS Dangerous Intersection

  • Woke Math, Revisited May 16, 2022
  • Needing More War News, NBC Analyzes Impending War with China May 16, 2022
  • The Mass Media’s Distorted Lens When It Decides Who to Blame for Mass Murders May 15, 2022

RSS Dark Ages America

  • Doomer Optimism April 26, 2022
  • The Sadness of War April 18, 2022
  • 450 March 28, 2022
  • Eminent Post-Victorians March 13, 2022

RSS David Bollier

  • Alanna Irving on Distributed Leadership and Infrastructures for Commoning May 1, 2022
  • Farewell to Christopher Alexander, Edgar Cahn, and Gustavo Esteva April 7, 2022
  • The Radical Open Access Collective: Building Better Knowledge Commons March 31, 2022

RSS David Cay Johnston (Link – National Memo)

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RSS David Harvey

  • The ABC of Contemporary Capital | Session 13 May 4, 2022
  • The ABC of Contemporary Capital | Session 12 April 27, 2022
  • The ABC of Contemporary Capital | Session 11 April 18, 2022

RSS David Hilfiker

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RSS David Roberts

  • Seattle’s unbelievable transportation megaproject fustercluck June 5, 2015
  • Please support Grist April 10, 2015
  • There’s an emerging right-wing divide on climate denial. Here’s what it means (and doesn’t) April 8, 2015

RSS Death by Car: Capitalism’s Drive to Carmageddon

  • Let’s go to the movies! a maple restaurant opened in a car theater May 12, 2022
  • Electric Vehicle Charging Station, No Compensation for Accidents May 12, 2022
  • Acting driver of Yongsan electric vehicle fatalities claims to jump ship in court May 4, 2022
  • A series of electric vehicle ‘heat runaway’ fire explosions April 28, 2022
  • Traffic accidents increase in April when highway repair work is heavy…”Driver needs to be careful” April 20, 2022

RSS Decline of the Empire

  • Defending Reality
  • Fascism And The Uniparty

RSS Deep Green Resistence News Service

  • Collapse is Coming. An Unsustainable Society Will Not Last. May 16, 2022
  • Eco-Terrorist or Water Protector? Jessica Reznicek Appeals Terrorism Charges May 13, 2022
  • How to Organize: The Spectrum of Allies May 9, 2022
  • An Alliance Between Human and Non-Human May 7, 2022

RSS Deepak Tripathi’s Diary

  • Afghanistan Awaits Uncertain Future After US Withdrawal July 7, 2021
  • UK’s Brexit Maze October 29, 2019

RSS Democratic Underground

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RSS Democratic Underground – Breaking News

  • AP Exclusive: Black Lives Matter has $42 million in assets May 17, 2022
  • Bank of England warns of 'apocalyptic' global food shortage May 17, 2022
  • Ransomware Gang Threatens to Overthrow Costa Rica Government May 17, 2022
  • Donald Trump Is Back On Twitter May 17, 2022
  • Manchin pushes for his gun reform bill in wake of Buffalo mass shooting May 17, 2022
  • 'Dire Consequences': Justice Gorsuch Sides with Liberals Against Justice Barrett's Majority Opinion May 17, 2022
  • Federal Election Commission deadlocks, won't punish Trump May 17, 2022
  • Reversing Trump measures, U.S. will expand flights to Cuba and resume family reunifications May 16, 2022
  • Ukrainian force begins evacuating from last Mariupol stronghold May 16, 2022
  • FDA comes to agreement with baby formula factory to resume production May 16, 2022

RSS Democratic Underground – Good Reads

  • What is the 'Great Replacement' and how is it tied to the Buffalo shooting suspect? May 17, 2022
  • Professor Kathleen Belew (was on Lawrence Show, 5/16/22.) May 17, 2022
  • Alito says overturning Roe gives women a voice on abortion. In the South, it's not that simple. May 17, 2022
  • Read the full, unclassified intelligence report on Russian hacking here May 17, 2022
  • Tucker Carlson's 'Great Replacement' Theory Comes From An Anti- US, Nazi French Thinker, Rene Binet May 16, 2022
  • EXPLAINER: White 'replacement theory' fuels racist attacks May 16, 2022
  • Perspective: What everyone gets wrong about evangelicals and abortion May 16, 2022
  • Living and working in Europe 2021 May 16, 2022
  • The Buffalo Shooting Is the Latest White Rage Backlash, Brought to You by the GOP May 16, 2022
  • Judges: We must set 'record straight.' Ohio Attorney General 'flatly misstating Ohio law' May 16, 2022

RSS Democracy Now

  • Abortion Activist Renee Bracey Sherman: Democrats Demand Our Votes But Fail to Protect Our Rights May 16, 2022
  • Antiracist Scholar Ibram X. Kendi: Republicans Must Address How White Supremacists Target Youth May 16, 2022
  • Buffalo Massacre: Gunman Cited Racist "Great Replacement" Conspiracy Theory Popularized by Fox News May 16, 2022
  • Now Is the Time for Reparations: India Walton on Buffalo Mass Shooting That Targeted Black Community May 16, 2022
  • Headlines for May 16, 2022 May 16, 2022
  • German Peace Activist Warns Finland Joining NATO Could Be Step Toward Nuclear War with Russia May 13, 2022
  • Mexican Journalists Protest "Staggering" Toll of Journalists Murdered with Impunity; 11 Slain in 2022 May 13, 2022
  • Nick Estes: Leonard Peltier's Continued Imprisonment Is an "Open Wound for Indian Country" May 13, 2022
  • Nick Estes: Indian Boarding Schools Were Part of "Horrific Genocidal Process" Carried Out by the U.S. May 13, 2022
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RSS Desdemona Despair

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RSS Desertification

  • King Mohammed VI Calls for Action Against Climate Change, Desertification May 11, 2022
  • COP15: we explain desertification in the world in figures May 11, 2022
  • Ivory Coast aims to raise $1.5 billion to restore forests, land May 11, 2022
  • Desertification and how to deal with it May 11, 2022
  • Talks over desertification start at COP15 as Earth faces ’emergency’ May 11, 2022

RSS deSmog Blog

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RSS Digbys Blog

  • Untitled January 12, 2020
  • They can save the world by @BloggersRUs January 12, 2020
  • Just drifting: R.I.P. Buck Henry By Dennis Hartley January 12, 2020
  • It looks like he wants to take Iraq's oil money January 12, 2020
  • Untitled January 11, 2020
  • Let's not forget who worked with Suleimani's IRGC January 11, 2020

RSS Disinfo – Ecology

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RSS Dispatches from the Underclass

  • How Sweden & Denmark Ride the Imperialist Wave, w/ Torkil Lauesen May 6, 2022
  • Why So Many Pakistanis Believe the US Backed a Coup Against Imran Khan, w/ Azhar Imran May 6, 2022
  • Ukraine War: Europe Shackles Itself to America’s Reckless Foreign Policy, w/ Prof Wolfgang Streeck May 6, 2022
  • Israeli Violence & Western Hypocrisy: Where Are the Palestinian Flag Emojis? w/ Ali Abunimah May 6, 2022
  • Was Imran Khan’s Ouster a US-Backed Coup? It’s Complicated, Says Pakistani Leftist Taimur Rahman May 6, 2022

RSS Dissent Magazine

  • A New Cold War? May 16, 2022
  • Bloody Sunday at Fifty May 13, 2022
  • Tech Workers Lie Flat May 11, 2022
  • Letters May 9, 2022

RSS Dissident Voice

  • The British Art of Black Propaganda May 17, 2022
  • “Booming” Economy Leaves Millions Behind: Part Four May 16, 2022
  • Henry Kissinger, the World Economic Forum and Population Control May 16, 2022
  • Morbid Matters: Estimating COVID-19 Mortality May 16, 2022
  • Farmers’ Struggle Not Over: Corporate Takeover of Indian Agriculture Still Looms May 15, 2022
  • Ending “West’s Neocolonial Oppression”: On the New Language and Superstructures May 15, 2022
  • Dateline May 25. 2026: U.S. and Canada at War! May 15, 2022
  • Decriminalized Marijuana Reinvents Racism and Poisoning May 14, 2022

RSS Do the Math

  • Human Exceptionalism February 16, 2022

RSS Dollars & Sense Blog

  • The Last Tour Guide to Leave Cuba April 16, 2022
  • New Issue! March 31, 2022
  • Ukraine: What Will Be Done and What Should Be Done? February 26, 2022
  • Asking the Right Questions about the Robinhood/GameStop Meme-Stock Mania February 16, 2022
  • Our Latest Issue February 12, 2022
  • Henry George: Prophet of the Gilded Age February 12, 2022

RSS Doug Stanhope

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RSS Douglas Rushkoff

  • Survival of the Richest May 9, 2022
  • Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires May 9, 2022
  • Rise to the Occasion May 4, 2022

RSS Dr. Paul Craig Roberts

  • Wisconsin School District Files Title IX Complaint Against 3 Middle School Boys For ‘Not Using Proper Pronouns’ May 16, 2022
  • The Russian Sanctions Have Failed May 16, 2022

RSS Dredd Blog

  • Quantum Biology - 10 May 14, 2022
  • The Shape Shifters Of Bullshitistan - 25 May 13, 2022
  • Cultural Epigenetic Messages May 11, 2022
  • Genomes For Sale Cheap May 10, 2022

RSS Ear to the Ground – Truth Dig

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RSS Early Warning

  • New York Not Close to Exiting Lockdown April 17, 2020
  • Is New York Containing Covid? April 8, 2020
  • New York vs Italy March 23, 2020

RSS Earth First

  • “UNC Dildo-Boy” accosts homophobic preacher, releases anti-technology declaration March 2, 2014
  • Subpoena caps bad week for fossil fuel March 2, 2014
  • Less Than 60 Hours Left to Support Indigenous Land Defenders! February 18, 2014

RSS Earth Observatory: Image of the Day, Natural Hazards, and News

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RSS Earth Observatory: Image of the Day

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RSS Earth Policy Institute Blog

  • Data Highlight - Wind Power Beats Nuclear Again in China
  • Data Highlight - Plastic Bag Bans or Fees Cover 49 Million Americans
  • Plan B Update - Fossil Fuel Development in the Arctic is a Bad Investment

RSS Ecocide Alert

  • How to Choose a Sportsbook May 16, 2022

RSS Ecohuman World

  • Our mission November 23, 2016
  • Ecohumanist society and ecology November 23, 2016

RSS Eco-Shock News

  • Radio Ecoshock: Can We Avoid Mass Extinction of Ocean Life? May 11, 2022

RSS Ecological Headstand

  • Dilke, Chapman, and Dahlberg Pop-ups May 15, 2021
  • For the Abolition of the Wages System! June 18, 2015
  • The Incredible Shrinking Blog June 9, 2015
  • Keynes "hadn't got round to it" May 25, 2015

RSS Ecological Sociology

  • Commons Enabling Infrastucture August 31, 2013
  • A Short History of Progress: Book Review August 26, 2013
  • Foucault, Power, Truth and Ecology August 14, 2013

RSS Ecologise

  • Charles Eisenstein: The Coronation May 16, 2020
  • Visakhapatnam gas leak accident: A preliminary modelling study May 15, 2020
  • The electric car must fail March 30, 2020
  • Economy and ecology are now in conflict; it’s time to integrate them with wisdom March 27, 2020
  • War, mismanagement and climate change: Iraq’s environment on the brink March 20, 2020
  • Big Farms make Big Flu: The deadly connection between industrial farming and pandemics March 17, 2020
  • The Songs of Trees: Stories From Nature’s Great Connectors March 13, 2020
  • Charles Hugh Smith: Could Covid-19 overwhelm us in the months ahead? March 10, 2020
  • Just like the economy, India’s forests too are thriving only on paper March 7, 2020
  • New Zealand’s ‘well-being budget’ and the unnecessary evil of economic growth March 4, 2020

RSS Economic Hardship Reporting Project

  • NATAL Season 2, Chapter 10: Returning May 17, 2022
  • I was wrongly detained at the border. It’s part of a larger problem. May 13, 2022
  • NATAL Season 2, Interlude: The Sisterhood May 10, 2022
  • “Women afraid of dying while / they are trying to find their life.” Poetry of Abortion by Alissa Quart May 6, 2022
  • Short Circuit May 4, 2022
  • NATAL Season 2, Chapter 9: Metamorphosis May 3, 2022

RSS Economic Undertow

  • The Death of Economics June 9, 2021
  • Cars and More Cars … March 22, 2021
  • Repost From 2015: Pied Piper of Dumb Money January 26, 2021

RSS EcoWorldView

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RSS Empire Burlesque

  • Generation of Vipers: The Original Sin and Continuous Crimes of America’s Involvement in Afghanistan August 17, 2021
  • Reich and Reality: Culture Wars of the Conquerors August 10, 2021

RSS Empirical Magazine

  • From the Empirical Archives: Genius or Folly? August 30, 2013
  • From the Empirical Archives: Nights Such as These August 29, 2013
  • From the Empirical Archives: Second Time Foster Child August 28, 2013

RSS EmptyWheel

  • Comings and Goings on the Proud Boy Leaders Prosecution
  • Scene-Setter for the Sussmann Trial, Part Two: The Witnesses
  • BMS: Breast Milk Substitute? Big Messy Situation [UPDATE-1]

RSS End of More

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RSS Energy Balance

  • “Four Meals From Anarchy” – We Must Grow More Food Locally. April 23, 2022
  • Russia-Ukraine War and the Changing Energy Landscape. March 16, 2022
  • Confronting the Changing Climate: COP26 - Scientists’ Warnings into Action, from Local to Global. November 14, 2021
  • The Energy Crisis and the Climate Crisis. October 4, 2021
  • IPCC Climate Report Signals “Code Red” for Humanity, but the reality is so much worse. August 15, 2021
  • Covid-19 and the Changing Climate: Seeking the Word. July 17, 2021

RSS Environment & Food Justice

  • National Association for Chicana and Chicano Studies Statement on the Climate Crisis October 31, 2019
  • La Lucha por La Sierra | Scion of Texas Oil Barons Seeks to Overturn Historic Use Rights to the Sangre de Cristo Land Grant August 30, 2018
  • Biopiracy in Mexico | Foundation stealing wild beehives in Yucatán June 14, 2018

RSS Envisionation Blog

  • Sir David King on Heatwaves, Action, & Activism: “No one will escape..” May 15, 2022
  • Fungi-based meat alternatives to help save Earth’s forests May 4, 2022
  • McGovern Leads Calls on President Biden to Pardon Environmental Lawyer Steven Donziger April 27, 2022
  • Dr Delton Chen | Ministry For A Living System Economy April 20, 2022

RSS Extraenvironmentalist Blog and Podcasts

  • [ Episode #95 // Economy of Things ] January 28, 2017
  • [ Episode #94 // Rocking the Google Bus ] October 25, 2016
  • [ Episode #93 // Climate Agreements ] September 5, 2016

RSS ExtraEnvironmentalist’s Videos

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RSS ExtraGeographic

  • Brexit, empire and cultural dementia. David Andress demolishes lazy nationalism
    A leave voter at the Save Brexit Rally wants Brexit so that Britain can “get back to being a British Empire”.… Read more The post Brexit, empire and cultural dementia. David Andress demolishes lazy nationalism first appeared on Extra Geographic.
  • Brexit explained in three tweets
    Three recent tweets encapsulate the misinformation, corruption and mess of Brexit Britain. They’re a window into a peculiar time. The UK government’s Department for International Trade (DIT) “helps businesses export, drives inward and outward investment, negotiates market access and trade deals, and champions free trade”.… Read more The post Brexit explained […]
  • Ann Pettifor on Carillion: ‘a grand Ponzi scheme’
    In a recent interview Ann Pettifor, global financial analyst, spoke about the corrupted crony capitalism that led to the collapse of Carillion, a major Government contractor.… Read more The post Ann Pettifor on Carillion: ‘a grand Ponzi scheme’ first appeared on Extra Geographic.
  • James Joyce in summary: escape is a key theme in his work
    Throughout his life James Joyce attempted to escape – from war, religion, convention, narrative structure, language… “When the soul of a man is born in this country there are nets flung at it to hold it back from flight.… Read more The post James Joyce in summary: escape is a key theme in his work first appeared on Extra Geographic.
  • Jeremy Clarkson buys an electric car: an optimistic vision of the UK’s EV future
    A nation’s stories play a large part in its future. Established ideas become conventional wisdom in social institutions. The institutions then draw on this wisdom when enacting public policy.… Read more The post Jeremy Clarkson buys an electric car: an optimistic vision of the UK’s EV future first appeared on Extra Geographic.

RSS Facts for Working People

  • Frederick Engels and Mary and Lizzy Burns May 16, 2022
  • Michael Roberts: Crypto unTethered May 15, 2022
  • Books: The John Carlos Story May 14, 2022

RSS Fair: Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting

  • Cherry-Picking Polls to Hide Public Support for Biden’s Spending Plan October 15, 2021
  • Jailing of a British Blogger Should Worry Journalists on Both Sides of the Atlantic  August 10, 2021
  • The Far Right’s Manufactured Meaning of Critical Race Theory August 4, 2021

RSS Fairewinds

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RSS Fairfax Climate Watch

  • The Day 2 Antigen Test When Travelling From The UK  November 19, 2021
  • Steps Towards Reducing Clinical Trials Footprint August 31, 2021
  • What Are CDISC Standards And Why Does It Matter? August 30, 2021

RSS Farooque Chowdhury’s Diary

  • Road rage faces student spirit August 4, 2018
  • Fires within the Arctic Circle July 28, 2018
  • A Facebook post on quota mobilisation July 14, 2018

RSS Feasta

  • Online discussion, May 18: Cross-sectoral economic measures to support biodiversity in Ireland April 28, 2022
  • Online discussion: moving the economic goalposts of Irish agriculture, April 28 April 21, 2022
  • Theda Skocpol names the problem, and the solution involves climate dividends March 31, 2022

RSS FireDogLake

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RSS Fish Out of Water

  • East Coast Bomb Tomorrow - Atlantic Ocean Current Shift Blowing up Coastal Storms: Climate Brief March 11, 2022
  • Russians attack and Seize Ukrainian Nuclear power plant, Major Nuclear Accident possible March 4, 2022
  • Polar Vortex is splitting now bringing on severe mid-continent storms & Atlantic bomb cyclones March 2, 2022
  • Climate Brief: A very deadly tornado season is likely this spring starting in March February 4, 2022
  • Record heat ahead of historic storms & winds late today in Iowa, Minnesota & Wisconsin December 15, 2021
  • COP-26 Abandons 1.5 C Target, Sticks with Big Net Zero Lie, but Hope is Rising out of the Ashes November 10, 2021

RSS Foreign Confidential

  • Film History: the French New Wave July 2, 2021
  • Nine Beautiful Places to Visit in Slovenia July 2, 2021
  • Top 10 European Islands to Visit July 2, 2021
  • Little Europe: the Amazing Microstates July 2, 2021

RSS FracTracker

  • Oil and Gas Brine in Ohio May 13, 2022
  • 8 Maps to Strengthen Environmental Justice Policy in Pennsylvania May 6, 2022
  • PA Environment Digest Blog: Conventional Oil & Gas Drillers Dispose Of Drill Cuttings By ‘Dusting’ May 3, 2022

RSS George Monbiot (Alternet)

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RSS George Monbiot (Official Home Page)

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RSS Get Real List: Chris Nelder

  • Moving on… July 9, 2021
  • My new gig December 5, 2015
  • Announcing the Energy Transition Show October 14, 2015

RSS Gil Smart

  • With Gil Smart on guns, the NRA January 19, 2015
  • Gil Smart right on development February 8, 2015
  • Gil Smart makes sense May 19, 2014
  • Right on, Gil Smart February 17, 2014

RSS Glen Ford – Black Agenda Report

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RSS Global Guerrillas

  • The Long Night is Coming January 4, 2019
  • Disruption, Drones, and Big Airports December 20, 2018

RSS Global Occupy News

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RSS Global Oneness Project

  • Student Curiosity and The Human Spirit During COVID-19 March 2, 2021

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RSS Gonzalo Lira

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RSS Green is the New Red

  • Trump Supporter Promises Legislation to Label Protest as “Economic Terrorism” November 22, 2016
  • Violence against environmentalists is now at an all-time high July 8, 2016
  • “To Build a Fire”: New Split EP With “Old Lines” and Will Potter June 13, 2016
  • “It changes who you are—forever. What you do with that change is what defines who you are.” April 28, 2016
  • Exclusive: New Virtual Reality Investigation Goes Inside Factory Farms April 13, 2016
  • New Sticker — Animal Rights Activists Must “Join or Die” February 22, 2016
  • “Truth and Power” TV series features Will Potter on “eco-terrorism,” ag-gag laws, and investigative journalism February 15, 2016
  • This woman rowed straight into a hurricane. And you should too. February 11, 2016
  • 6 Lessons From How the FBI and Media Treat Militia Groups January 12, 2016
  • Here’s How One Activist Convinced the FBI to Leave Him Alone December 7, 2015

RSS Green on Huffington Post

  • Tennessee Couple Finds Stray Dog Cuddled Up Next To Them In Bed May 17, 2022
  • How A Major Tar Sands Pipeline Project Threatens Indigenous Land Rights May 15, 2022
  • 'Like An Inferno:' U.S. West Burning At Furious Pace So Far May 13, 2022
  • Urine Luck: Michigan Researchers Are Putting The “Pee” In Peony May 13, 2022
  • Scientists Grow Plants In Lunar Soil For First Time Ever May 12, 2022
  • 91% Of Surveyed Corals Bleached Along Great Barrier Reef, Australia Says May 11, 2022
  • Great Barrier Reef Condition Now 'Very Poor' May 11, 2022
  • Dog Rescued From Cage Thrown Into River Finds New Home: 'He Still Loves People' May 10, 2022

RSS Greenpeace Blogs

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RSS Greg Palast

  • 2,000 Mules: Belly Laughs, Belly Aches from Film’s “Proof” that Trump Won May 8, 2022
  • West Virginia protest calls out Manchin’s dirty coal profits16 people arrested after blocking entrance to Grant Town Power Plant April 14, 2022

RSS Gregor Macdonald

  • Oil Fall December 31, 2018

RSS Grinning Planet

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RSS Grist

  • Why Boulder and Flagstaff are enlisting cities to suck carbon out of the atmosphere May 17, 2022
  • Report: Europe’s chicken supply chain has a human rights problem May 17, 2022
  • ‘Flash droughts’ are Midwest’s next big climate threat May 16, 2022
  • North Carolina house that collapsed into the sea is a warning for millions of Americans May 16, 2022

RSS Growth Busters

  • Chickens are Coming Home to Roost May 11, 2022
  • Paul Ehrlich, Unfiltered (Special Earth Day Episode) April 19, 2022
  • Obsessive-Compulsive’s Guide to Cutting Your Carbon Footprint March 30, 2022
  • Can Living a 1.5 Degree Lifestyle Make a Difference? March 9, 2022

RSS Guernica Mag

  • On Stoicism May 16, 2022
  • Song of the Lake May 12, 2022
  • Cut Off May 11, 2022
  • The Pearl Pavilion May 10, 2022

RSS Guy McPherson’s Blog

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RSS Health After Oil

  • Public Health’s Response to Decline: Loyalty to the 1% December 15, 2014

RSS Hot Topic: Global Warming and the Future of New Zealand

  • Postcards from La La Land #132: time warps and twaddle June 7, 2018
  • The final cut: crank paper on NZ temperature record gets its rebuttal – warming continues unabated May 2, 2018
  • Anthropogenic climate change is real: pithy post-punk anthem for the Trump generation December 9, 2017

RSS How to Save the World

  • Facing My Misanthropy May 16, 2022
  • How Many Canadians Have Died From CoVid-19? May 15, 2022
  • Links of the Month: May 2022 May 14, 2022

RSS I am Not a Number

  • Alt-Right conspiracy theories are obviously true… except they are not. January 24, 2022
  • The civil war in the LP was NEVER about antisemitism. November 20, 2020
  • English patriotism and the left – a political conundrum October 3, 2020

RSS I Cite

  • "Feudalism Lives on in the Delta" -- Ray Sprigle August 17, 2020
  • Critical Theory and Climate Change 2 April 2, 2020
  • Critical Theory and Climate Change 1 March 23, 2020
  • Untitled July 18, 2019
  • America's obsession with rooting out communism is making a comeback September 25, 2018

RSS Iamronen

  • Born to fight May 8, 2022
  • The Art Of Life May 7, 2022
  • Celebration and … the Sacred? April 13, 2022
  • Realms Beyond Reason April 12, 2022
  • Who By Fire – Leonard Cohen, Israel … and I April 11, 2022

RSS Ian Welsh

  • Who Wins and Loses Because of the Ukraine War? May 16, 2022

RSS Idea Explorer

  • Learning As We Go October 29, 2021
  • Values and Responsibilities March 11, 2021
  • Habitat Loss November 9, 2020
  • Marginal Hope August 24, 2020
  • A Pandemic-Altered Future April 15, 2020

RSS Idea Explorer – Big Pic Explorer

  • Consumption Drop November 25, 2020
  • Habitat Loss November 9, 2020
  • General Update February 24, 2020

RSS Idea Explorer: Land of Conscience

  • Remembrance September 22, 2021
  • Seeking Miracles July 15, 2021
  • Emergence May 3, 2021

RSS If You Love This Planet – Helen Caldicott

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RSS Indybay Features

  • The Supreme Court Intends to Overturn Roe v Wade
  • St. Mary's Sunday Mass Disrupted, Catholic Patriarchy Denounced
  • Russia Moves to Take All of Ukraine by Military Force
  • Bay Area Groups Mobilize to Protest the Drumbeat to War

RSS Indybay Newswire

  • How Foster Care Affects Outcomes in Adulthood
  • The Great Reboot and Investing in Death
  • Ads and Body Image in Society
  • Florida Approves Risky Release of Billions of Genetically Engineered Mosquitoes in Scientifically Flawed Experiment
  • Green Party endorsements, and also the "Green Voter Guide"

RSS Information Clearing House

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RSS Inside Left – The OFFICIAL Anti-Olympics Blog™

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RSS Institute for Public Accuracy

  • Facebook Lifting Ban on Neo-Nazi Azov Battalion “Stunning” May 16, 2022
  • Ukraine: “Horrible Dangers” of a Proxy War; Nuclear War May 12, 2022
  • Amazon Terminated Paid Sick Leave for Covid-19 After Union Vote May 12, 2022
  • Israeli Killing of Palestinian Journalist a “Calculated Act of Savagery” May 11, 2022
  • Marcos Win in Philippines: Dynasties and Social Media Manipulation May 11, 2022
  • Scientific Analysis Links Environmental Change and New Diseases May 11, 2022

RSS International Debt Observatory

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RSS io9

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RSS iWatch: Global Muckraking

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RSS Jack Nelson-Pallmeyer Blog

  • Five Things We Need to Know About the “Fiscal Cliff” December 10, 2012
  • Wasteful Pentagon Spending and Costly Wars Hurting Minnesota Communities November 6, 2012

RSS Jacobin

  • ICE Is Tracking Your Every Move May 16, 2022
  • How Migrant Workers From the Philippines Power Modern Capitalism May 16, 2022
  • Was the US Really Ever Trying to Win the War on Drugs? May 16, 2022
  • Left-Wing Populism Can Win in Trump-Voting Areas, Too May 16, 2022
  • We Can’t Talk About the Racist Massacre in Buffalo Without Talking About Capitalism May 16, 2022
  • Israel’s Defenders Are Funding a New Effort to Defeat Socialists in New York May 16, 2022

RSS Jeremy Scahill

  • But What About Hamas’s Rockets? May 14, 2021

RSS Jill Stein

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RSS Joe Bageant

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RSS John Cook Video Uploads

  • The Science of Cranky Uncle Part 3: Fighting Misinformation with Critical Thinking December 29, 2021
  • The Science of Cranky Uncle Part 2: Inoculation Theory December 21, 2021
  • The Science of Cranky Uncle Part 1: Why We Can't Ignore Misinformation December 14, 2021
  • Climate misinformation: Will Happer on CO2 being plant food January 24, 2021

RSS John Hively

  • The War Over Global Warming is Class Warfare on Many Fronts July 24, 2021
  • How the Billionaires Corporate News Media Have Been Used to Brainwash Us May 1, 2021

RSS John Pilger

  • WAR IN EUROPE AND THE RISE OF RAW PROPAGANDA

RSS John Perkins

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RSS John W. Whitehead

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RSS John Zerzan: Anarchy Radio

  • Anarchy Radio 05 10 2022 May 11, 2022
  • Anarchy Radio 04 12 2022 April 13, 2022
  • #143 | The New Primitives: The Reverse Teleology Of Primitivist Transformation w/ Ben Etherington April 8, 2022

RSS Jonathan Turley

  • The GW Commencement Controversy: A Response To Rep. Susan Wild May 16, 2022
  • The Post-Roe World: A Reality Check on the Implications of the Leaked Supreme Court Opinion May 16, 2022
  • “Silence the Voices of Hatred”: N.Y. Governor Hochul Uses the Buffalo Massacre to Renew Calls for Censorship of Social Media May 15, 2022
  • Clarence Thomas: “When Someone Uses Stare Decisis that Means They’re Out of Arguments” May 14, 2022

RSS Karl Grossman

  • I've switched from this site to my website -- www.karlgrossman.com -- for my blog. November 29, 2015
  • The End of Police Raids -- at Long Last -- on Gays of Fire Island July 1, 2015
  • "Fire Island Was Paradise,Truly Paradise" June 21, 2015
  • My First Big Story June 1, 2015
  • Disaster Waiting to Happen at Indian Point May 12, 2015

RSS Karl North Eco-Intelligence

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RSS Kate Ausburn

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RSS Keith Farnish

  • Uprooting Civilization (Part 2) May 7, 2014
  • Uprooting Civilization (Part 1) February 21, 2014
  • The Problem With…Conspiracy Theories January 7, 2014

RSS Knight Science Journalism – MIT

  • The Tracker Now Lives Here … November 1, 2015
  • A farewell post: Three reasons why good science writing is worth defending. January 6, 2015
  • Globe story on non-invasive prenatal testing offers murky argument. December 31, 2014
  • (UPDATED/2*) What Ho? A 2014 List of Lists of best, worst, or otherwisest in 2014 December 30, 2014
  • Cancer & poverty: When a reporter’s journey becomes part of the story. December 23, 2014

RSS Kulture Critic

  • In the Folds of the Flesh: Philosophic Reflections on Touch November 6, 2021

RSS Kunstler Cast

  • John B. McLemore Email to JHK: Huffing gas fumes in shittown alabama June 1, 2017
  • Release: S-Town Podcast Prequel: KunstlerCast Ready for Binge Listening May 31, 2017
  • KunstlerCast: S-Town May 31, 2017
  • James Howard Kunstler on John B. McLemore of S-Town May 31, 2017
  • Transcript: KunstlerCast: S-Town May 31, 2017

RSS Kurt Kobb

  • Just a hint from the mainstream that limits precipitate rising oil prices May 15, 2022

RSS Lack of Environment

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RSS Law and Disorder

  • Law and Disorder May 16, 2022 May 16, 2022
  • Law and Disorder May 16, 2022 May 15, 2022
  • Law and Disorder May 9, 2022 May 9, 2022

RSS Le Monde diplomatique – English edition

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RSS Le Monde diplomatique – Open Page

  • Lebanon: ‘Preserving the past in hope of building the future' May 16, 2022
  • US Supreme Court: a law unto itself May 15, 2022
  • May: the longer view May 10, 2022
  • China's delicate balancing act May 9, 2022
  • French far right's fight to keep Algeria May 3, 2022

RSS Leaving Babylon

  • Even Iran is laughing at us November 9, 2020

RSS Lee Camp

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RSS Lee Fang

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RSS Leonardo Boff

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RSS Les Leopold

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RSS Life Itself

  • Bad Karma April 9, 2022
  • Hope Dies Last March 10, 2022
  • Ascent of the Angry and Stupid December 27, 2021

RSS Limited, Inc.

  • The oracles are not dead May 15, 2022
  • sometimes an ugly thought becomes a poem - Karen Chamisso May 13, 2022
  • pain pain pain May 11, 2022

RSS Link TV – Earth Focus

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RSS Low-Tech Magazine

  • How to Build a Practical Household Bike Generator March 7, 2022
  • The Revenge of the Hot Water Bottle January 21, 2022
  • The Printed Website: Volume III & The Comments December 2, 2021

RSS LRB Blog

  • Who’s best? May 17, 2022
  • Shireen Abu Akleh 1971-2022 May 16, 2022
  • I am not a robot May 13, 2022
  • These are our neighbours May 13, 2022
  • Why did they trust Johnson? May 12, 2022

RSS Luis J. Rodriguez

  • Help Luis J. Rodriguez become California governor January 5, 2022
  • Stand Firm on Election Day November 3, 2020
  • 50th Anniversary of Chicano Moratorium Against the Vietnam War August 31, 2020

RSS Mabinogogiblog

  • Letter to QUNO 1.5 April 8, 2022
  • Preventing a repetition of the Ukraine tragedy April 3, 2022
  • Solving the Chimpanzee Problem that led to the invasion of Ukraine February 24, 2022
  • Examining the Covid claims of Dr Robert Malone February 5, 2022

RSS Manicore – Accueil

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RSS Marginal Revolution

  • My *Talent* podcast with the excellent David Wright May 17, 2022
  • What is the best interview question of all time? May 17, 2022
  • The excellent Matt Clifford does a *Talent* podcast with Daniel Gross and me May 16, 2022

RSS Mark Biskeborn – Underground Essays

  • Kafkaesque November 11, 2014
  • Larry Summers Still Living Large April 9, 2013
  • War and Corruption Deficits: Insects and Leviathans January 21, 2013
  • Breaking News: Lt. Col. Shaffer Accuses Former CIA Dir. Tenet December 29, 2012

RSS Mark Fiore

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RSS Mark Lynas

  • Clock is ticking in race to slow carbon dioxide emissions, scientists warn January 13, 2022
  • COP26: Crunch time for the climate October 29, 2021
  • COP26 climate change summit: Here’s what each degree of global warming would mean for the planet October 25, 2021
  • Greater than 99% consensus on human caused climate change in the peer-reviewed scientific literature October 20, 2021
  • Forget net zero – let’s have a ‘fossil freedom day’ October 20, 2021

RSS Martin Wolf

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RSS Matt Bruenig

  • Reactions to the Alito Opinion May 4, 2022
  • Conservatives and Corporate Power April 29, 2022
  • Jill Filipovic On Compensating Non-Market Care Work April 12, 2022

RSS Matt Taibbi

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RSS Matt Wuerker

  • Cartoon: Freedom of speech is absolute, but... April 30, 2015
  • Cartoon: Clinton Inc April 23, 2015
  • Cartoon: Reince's Women Issues April 16, 2015
  • Cartoon: The way to win April 9, 2015
  • No Cake for you! April 2, 2015

RSS Max Keiser

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RSS Media Lens

  • The Price Of ‘Selective Inattention’ – Iraq, Ukraine, Libya, And The Climate Apocalypse May 5, 2022
  • Burying ‘An Atlas Of Human Suffering’: Climate Breakdown And The Tory Chancellor March 25, 2022
  • Doubling Down On Double Standards – The Ukraine Propaganda Blitz March 4, 2022

RSS Media Matters – Environment

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RSS Media Matters – Everything

  • Fox guest on possible troop withdrawal from Afghanistan: "The solution is more blood, sweat, and tears" 
  • Fox host defends Trump: "Just because you use harsh language doesn't mean your intent is to denigrate another race"
  • Fox News is talking more about abortion than the Democratic debates did

RSS Media Roots

  • Media Roots Radio: How Billionaire Military Industrial Complex Tech Giant Elon Musk Will Save Free Speech April 24, 2022
  • Empire Files Podcast: A Russian Anti-War Perspective on Ukraine April 21, 2022
  • Peter Joseph on Abby Martin’s New Podcast DOSED April 13, 2022

RSS Methane Hydrates

  • Joint New Zealand - German 3D survey reveals massive seabed gas hydrate and methane system May 12, 2014
  • Noctilucent clouds: further confirmation of large methane releases December 10, 2013
  • Earthquake M6.7 hits Sea of Okhotsk October 2, 2013

RSS Michael Hudson

  • The Destiny of Civilization May 16, 2022
  • Calling to Account the Hereditary Warrior Class May 12, 2022
  • Ukraine 4 Steps On May 4, 2022

RSS Michael Miller – Viewpoint

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RSS Michael Parenti

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RSS Mike Philbin – Free Planet

  • STAR CITIZEN - HALF A BILLION DOLLARS - TEN YEARS AND COUNTING September 1, 2021
  • ELECTRO-BULLET: reinterpreting a classic... August 28, 2021
  • LAST OF THE CATHEDRA available in trade paperback from Amazon. October 24, 2020

RSS Mondoweiss

  • Israeli forces kill Daoud Zubeidi, brother of political prisoner Zakaria Zubeidi May 16, 2022
  • Canadian agency rules “Produce of Israel” labels violate Canadian law May 16, 2022

RSS Mons Angelorum: Deadly Serious 3

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RSS Mons Angelorum: Waiting for Good Weather

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RSS Mother Jones

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RSS MR Zine

  • Yoshie Furuhashi, "After MRZine" January 1, 2017
  • Louis Allday, "Controlling the Narrative on Syria" December 14, 2016
  • Marta Harnecker, "Fidel, Today and Forever" December 11, 2016
  • Prabhat Patnaik, "Developing 'Infrastructure'" December 9, 2016
  • Susie Day, "Forward Ever, Normal Never: Taking Down Donald Trump" December 6, 2016
  • Samir Amin, "The Election of Donald Trump" December 1, 2016

RSS Musings on Iraq

  • Security In Iraq May 1-7, 2022 May 16, 2022
  • This Day In Iraqi History - May 16 Sykes-Picot agreement made between French and UK officials to divide up Ottoman Empire in Mideast May 16, 2022
  • This Day In Iraqi History - May 15 Iraqi army attacked Israel in 1948 Arab-Israeli War May 15, 2022

RSS Nafeez Ahmed

  • IDF's Gaza assault is to control Palestinian gas, avert Israeli energy crisis | Nafeez Ahmed July 9, 2014
  • World Bank and UN carbon offset scheme 'complicit' in genocidal land grabs - NGOs | Nafeez Ahmed July 3, 2014
  • The open source revolution is coming and it will conquer the 1% - ex CIA spy | Nafeez Ahmed June 19, 2014
  • Iraq blowback: Isis rise manufactured by insatiable oil addiction June 16, 2014

RSS Naked Capitalism

  • Links 5/17/2022 May 17, 2022
  • Peru Sues Spanish Oil Giant Repsol for Billions After “Worst Ever” Oil Spill May 17, 2022
  • When Central Bank Saviours Are the Problem May 17, 2022
  • The Surprising Benefits of Voting for Change May 17, 2022
  • Seventeen States Sue EPA for Allowing California to Set Tougher Vehicle Emissions Standards May 16, 2022

RSS Naomi Klein

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RSS Naomi Klein – Guardian.UK

  • Naomi Klein: how big tech helps India target climate activists March 4, 2021
  • We were told Joe Biden was the 'safe choice'. But it was risky to offer so little | Naomi Klein November 8, 2020

RSS Nature Protects, As She is Protected

  • No Name Calling Please, Give Us Evidence Which Proves GM Crops Are Safe March 30, 2017
  • Let’s Be Honest About Genetically Modified Crops March 9, 2017

RSS Navdanya’s Diary

  • Food for health: the right to health is to live healthy lives June 3, 2020
  • Making peace with the Earth. 600 organisations urge a sustainable new start April 24, 2020
  • The Seed War March 20, 2020

RSS New Internationalist

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RSS New World Notes

  • Observations on Work June 20, 2021
  • The GOP and the Dems: Hypocrisy and Betrayal June 13, 2021
  • Can Technology Save Us? June 8, 2021

RSS News Junkie Post

  • Forget Wars on Covid and Terror: War on Climate Collapse Is the Only War of Necessity for Human Survival August 22, 2021
  • Covid Fear Management Policies: Distractions from and Tests for Looming Climate Collapse August 4, 2021
  • France Neoliberal Macron: Vanguard of a Covid Global Corporate Dictatorship? July 24, 2021
  • Magic Woman of Haiti’s Mountains July 18, 2021
  • Afghanistan War Outcome: Hope for Sovereign Nations Fighting the Scourge of Neocolonial Imperialism July 17, 2021
  • Afghanistan: Deadly Costs of a War for Profit Won by the Taliban July 9, 2021

RSS NOAA: Monthly State of the Climate Report

  • April 2022 Monthly National Climate Report

RSS Notes from the Aboveground

  • On Inequality July 27, 2015
  • Shameless is as shameless does July 21, 2015

RSS NYT Examiner

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RSS Occupy.com

  • The Rise and (Not So Fast) Fall of Londongrad March 18, 2022
  • How Students Struggling to Get Educated in Kashmir Came Up With Collective Solutions During the Pandemic March 10, 2022
  • Reckoning with Britain’s Cost-of-Living Crisis: Causes and Solutions January 28, 2022
  • GND 15: Chile's Popular Political Revolution Offers Lessons Far Beyond its Shoreline January 28, 2022
  • The Threat of Republican Fascism, Part II: The War on Fair Elections January 6, 2022
  • How India’s Farmers Achieved Victory After a Yearlong Protest December 17, 2021
  • Green New Deal XIV: Climate Catastrophe Demands We Tear Down Deadly Borders December 3, 2021
  • 10th anniversary of Occupy Wall Street November 28, 2021

RSS Occupy las Vegas

  • Crypto Boom Alternativen April 22, 2022
  • Stortingen en opnames bij Bitcoin Revolution December 25, 2021
  • Alternativen zu PC Health Advisor October 21, 2021

RSS Occupy Wall Street

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RSS Oddity Central

  • Mom Draws Criticism for Giving One-Year-Old Son Realistic Temporary Tattoos May 16, 2022
  • Colombian Makeup Artist Creates Mind-Boggling optical Illusions May 16, 2022
  • True Romantic – Man Proposes to Girlfriend at Her Father’s Funeral May 16, 2022
  • Indian Couple Sue Son for $650,000 for Not Giving Them a Grandchild May 13, 2022
  • Luxury Brand Sells $1,850 “Fully-Destroyed” Sneakers May 13, 2022
  • Rare Condition Causes 19-Year-Old Girl to Look Like a Much Younger Child May 13, 2022

RSS Of Two Minds

  • Checking In On Five Long-Term Cycles May 16, 2022
  • Curveballs in the Housing Bubble Bust May 13, 2022
  • Herd on the Street May 11, 2022

RSS One Penny Sheet

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RSS One Struggle – South Florida

  • We Scream for Change and They Respond by Supporting the Status Quo March 29, 2022
  • We Must Take Our Cities Back from the Bourgeoisie! February 10, 2022
  • It’s Time to Expose the Fuckery January 9, 2022
  • Kenbe Fèm: Film Screening and Discussion with a Member of Batay Ouvriye September 13, 2021

RSS Orion Magazine

  • Five Questions for Megan Mayhew Bergman, author of How Strange a Season March 29, 2022
  • 17 Poetry Collections to read during Women’s History Month March 23, 2022
  • Orion Staff Recommends: What We’re Reading, Watching, and Doing This Month March 8, 2022

RSS Our Finite World

  • The world has a major crude oil problem; expect conflict ahead April 21, 2022
  • No one will win in the Russia-Ukraine conflict March 28, 2022
  • Russia’s attack on Ukraine represents a demand for a new world order March 2, 2022

RSS Pando Daily

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RSS Paul Haeder

  • Reality Privileged: Orwell/Huxley/McLuhan on Steroids May 11, 2022
  • mother moves her body to feed the world May 8, 2022
  • May Day is International ‘Thank a Worker’ Day May 1, 2022

RSS Paul Kingsnorth – Elswhere

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RSS Paul L. Street

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RSS PBD – Progressive Blog Digest

  • 46 January 21, 2021
  • HIS LEGACY January 20, 2021
  • THE END GAME January 19, 2021

RSS PeakOil.com News

  • Saudi Aramco net profit soars 82% May 15, 2022
  • Amplification Loops on Fault Lines May 15, 2022
  • Limits to Growth: Where We Stand Today May 14, 2022

RSS Peak Prosperity Blog

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RSS Peak Prosperity: Daily Digest

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RSS Peak Prosperity: Featured Voices

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RSS People Before Profit Blog

  • "Blacklisted Again" Michael Berkowitz on "Trumbo" by Norman Markowitz December 10, 2015
  • A Corrected and Updated Version of The "Madness" of Donald Trump by Norman Markowitz December 9, 2015
  • The "Madness" of Donald Trump by Norman Markowitz December 8, 2015

RSS Phlegm

  • "we fight each other while it devours us" Belgium June 2017 December 1, 2017
  • West Didsbury Manchester. May 2017 December 1, 2017
  • Dulwich picture gallery. April 25th 2017 December 1, 2017

RSS Phyllis Bennis

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RSS Physicist-Retired Newsvine

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RSS Pink Tank

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RSS PlanetSave – Climate

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RSS Political Violence @ a Glance

  • Other Peoples’ Wars May 9, 2022
  • Does Putin Need Street Support to Stay In Power? May 2, 2022
  • How Blowback by Armed Groups Is Turning Civil Wars into International Conflicts April 28, 2022

RSS Popular Resistance

  • The Israeli Execution Of Al Jazeera Reporter Shireen Abu Akleh May 16, 2022
  • Summit Of The Americas Could Be Biden’s Foreign Policy Embarrassment May 16, 2022
  • Live-Action Role Play In Ukraine May 16, 2022
  • Mali’s Military Ejects France, But Faces Serious Challenges May 16, 2022

RSS PRN with Danny Schechter

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RSS Progressive Radio Network

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RSS ProPublica

  • The State Behind Roe’s Likely Demise Also Does the Least for New Parents in Need May 16, 2022
  • The COVID Testing Company That Missed 96% of Cases May 16, 2022
  • The Plot to Keep Meatpacking Plants Open During COVID-19 May 13, 2022
  • Illinois Will Stop Helping Cities Collect Some School Ticket Debt From Students May 13, 2022
  • Katrina Survivors Were Told They Could Use Grant Money to Rebuild. Now They’re Being Sued for It. May 12, 2022

RSS Project Censored

  • Global Civil War: Capitalism Post Pandemic May 17, 2022
  • PayPal, US/NATO, Biden’s Disinformation Governance Board, Roe vs. Wade, and More – Featuring Guests Alan MacLeod, Steve Macek, and Shealeigh Voitl May 9, 2022
  • Book Banning on the Rise in the US May 6, 2022

RSS Public Intelligence

  • (U//FOUO) Central Florida Intelligence Exchange Bulletin: Literary Propaganda Used To Drive Violent Extremist Narratives Towards the U.S. Government and Law Enforcement
  • (U//FOUO) DHS Bulletin: Moscow’s Invasion of Ukraine Impeding Reach of Russian State Media in the West
  • DHS Public-Private Analytic Exchange Program Report: Combatting Targeted Disinformation Campaigns A Whole-of-Society Issue Part Two August 2021
  • DHS Public-Private Analytic Exchange Program Report: Combatting Targeted Disinformation Campaigns A Whole-of-Society Issue October 2019
  • Department of Energy Cybersecurity and Digital Components Supply Chain Deep Dive Assessment
  • (U//FOUO) DHS Bulletin: Warning of Potential for Cyber Attacks Targeting the United States in the Event of a Russian Invasion of Ukraine
  • (U//LES) Nevada High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area Bulletin: Dark Web and Cryptocurrency What to Look for During a Search Warrant
  • DoD Report: Countering Extremist Activity Within the Department of Defense
  • U.S. Army Techniques Publication: Chinese Tactics
  • (U//FOUO) DHS Bulletin: Iranian Influence Efforts Primarily Use Online Tools to Target US Audiences, Remain Easily Detectable for Now

RSS Pulse

  • A Protest for Ukraine free of Dogma and Cynicism March 2, 2022
  • Dismantling Hindutva with Islamophobia? February 19, 2022
  • Of UnStating the Stated, and the Silences in its Wake February 10, 2022
  • Tunisia and the Spectre of Authoritarianism July 15, 2021

RSS Quartz

  • China’s covid prevention apparatus is here to stay May 17, 2022
  • 🌍 Elon vs the bots May 17, 2022
  • A rocket-builder’s SPAC cash is rehabbing a defunct Navy base May 17, 2022
  • Kenyan crypto traders trying to ‘buy the dip’ got burned May 17, 2022
  • The export bans driving up food prices around the world May 17, 2022
  • India’s largest ever IPO has met its nightmare scenario May 17, 2022
  • Nigerian airlines can’t stop pushing up prices May 17, 2022
  • The Ukraine war has shown that cryptocurrencies are no hedge against equities May 17, 2022
  • Indians blame corruption, poor infra for power cuts amid heatwaves May 17, 2022
  • Google and PayPal are hiding most of their carbon footprint in their bank accounts May 17, 2022

RSS Question Everything

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RSS R-Squared Energy

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RSS Rabett Run

  • Dr Valerie Masson-Delmotte on the WGIII report Part 2 Know your nomenclature April 5, 2022
  • Dr. Valérie Masson-Delmotte on the WG III report Part I April 5, 2022
  • Coming Home to Roost March 1, 2022

RSS Rabble.Ca

  • Kenney Government seeks ‘a unicorn’ to solve health care crisis May 16, 2022
  • Media ignore tragedies, exploitation in Canadian mines May 16, 2022
  • Colombian climate activists suspect paramilitary groups tied to oil industry May 16, 2022
  • Dismantling patriarchy is impossible without trans liberation May 16, 2022

RSS Radical Philosophy

  • The myth of Aufheben May 16, 2022
  • Being, becoming, subsumption May 16, 2022
  • ‘Everything can be made better, except man’ May 16, 2022
  • Dismantling the apparatus of domination? May 16, 2022

RSS Ran Prieur

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RSS Random Communications from an Evolutionary Edge

  • Engaging with the Evolving Whole February 1, 2022
  • A new face – and new ways to engage! January 21, 2022

RSS RANTINGS ON MARKETS, ECONOMICS AND BUSINESS STRATEGY

  • France’s Sunday Presidential Election Looms Large April 9, 2022
  • 2022 – A World Where Everything Is On The Brink March 8, 2022
  • The Power Elite, The World Of Men, And A Simple Litmus Test To Determine When They Will Be Defeated February 8, 2022

RSS Read the Science

  • IPCC Discovers Infographics – Communicates Climate Change April 11, 2014
  • Show me the Money: Adaptation Finance February 18, 2014
  • The Coffee Grower’s Paradox January 24, 2014
  • Stinking Hot Down Under January 17, 2014
  • Send in the Clouds January 10, 2014

RSS Reader Supported News

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RSS Reader Supported News – Posts

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RSS Real Economics

  • Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – May 15, 2022 May 15, 2022
  • Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – May 8, 2022 May 8, 2022
  • Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – May 1, 2022 May 1, 2022

RSS Real-World Economics Review Blog

  • Crypto-crash: graph May 16, 2022
  • Formalizing economic theory May 16, 2022
  • Weekend read – MMT, post-Keynesians and currency hierarchy: Notes towards a synthesis May 14, 2022

RSS Red Pepper

  • Northern Ireland’s new political terrain May 15, 2022
  • The Red Wall: a political narrative May 10, 2022
  • Simon Hedges winning here May 5, 2022
  • The Tower Hamlets story May 3, 2022
  • Political education for all May 1, 2022

RSS Reddit: Environment

  • Bank of England warns of 'apocalyptic' global food shortage May 16, 2022
  • Oil and Gas industry are selling assets to smaller companies to appear greener on paper May 17, 2022
  • Shut down fossil fuel production sites early to avoid climate chaos, says study | Fossil fuels May 17, 2022
  • IKEA to Start Selling Solar Panels in California Stores May 16, 2022
  • One Tree Per Child celebrates 100,000 tree planting milestone May 16, 2022
  • Marine life is on the brink of extinction: Climate reality is a real issue May 16, 2022

RSS Reddit: Overpopulation – Unending Growth

  • Advocating for murder, eugenics, or culling people does not help make recognition of overpopulation more mainstream. August 12, 2021
  • We can't feed the world only with organic food May 15, 2022
  • Breed or get sued May 14, 2022
  • What Fate Awaits Our Kids? We won't—if we're honest—be able to tell them that we didn't know what was coming. May 14, 2022
  • 1.4 Billion petroleum powered vehicles in the world today May 13, 2022

RSS Republic of Lakotah – Mitakuye Oyasin

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RSS Resilience.org

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RSS Richard Heinberg

  • Museletter #350: The Failure of Global Elites April 29, 2022
  • Museletter #349: After the Ukraine Invasion March 25, 2022

RSS Robert Koehler

  • Eve’s Choice: Patriarchy No Longer Rules May 11, 2022

RSS Robert Kuttner

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RSS Robert Lindsay

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RSS Robert Scheer

  • Imagining A New World on the Other Side of the Pandemic March 20, 2020

RSS Robert Scribbler

  • Faith in Climate Action — The Church’s Response to Hothouse Earth July 8, 2020
  • A Possible Vaccine, But When? May 18, 2020
  • Social Distancing and Waiting Until It’s Safe Enough to Re-open April 30, 2020

RSS Rogue Columnist

  • Book break February 15, 2022
  • Death and life of Sunbelt cities February 8, 2022
  • Grand Avenue January 31, 2022
  • Days of risk January 24, 2022
  • More Valley towns January 18, 2022

RSS RollingStone: Politics

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RSS RT: Documentary

  • Free to be yourself. Surf master & disabled pupil inspire each other (Trailer) Premiere 02/23 February 20, 2018
  • Beauty and the Bleach. Skin-whitening trend ravages Senegalese women February 18, 2018
  • A gastronomic odyssey through St. Pete’s literary haunts – Taste of Russia Ep. 17 February 18, 2018
  • Beauty and the Bleach.Skin-whitening trend ravages Senegalese women (Trailer) Premiere 02/19 February 15, 2018
  • Of Ice and Fame. Medvedeva v Zagitova: friends off the ice, rivals on it February 14, 2018
  • Is this a yolk? Ostrich omelettes & peculiar pastries - Taste of Russia Ep. 16 February 12, 2018
  • Champions of the spirit. Unknown stories of 1st Soviet Olympic medalists February 8, 2018
  • Of Ice and Fame. Medvedeva v Zagitova: friends off the ice, rivals on it (Trailer) Premiere 02/10 February 7, 2018
  • Champions of the spirit. Unknown stories of 1st Soviet Olympic medalists (Trailer) Premiere 02/09 February 5, 2018
  • Art at the Stake. Afghan artists risk lives to return style, music, and culture to their country February 5, 2018

RSS RT Today

  • US envoy weighs in on Ukraine NATO prospects May 17, 2022
  • Messi set for major move – reports May 17, 2022
  • Musk raises concerns over US economy May 17, 2022
  • Is Abramovich’s Chelsea sale really ‘in jeopardy’? May 17, 2022
  • Canada’s indigenous communities seek reparations from Elizabeth II May 17, 2022
  • Russia becoming one of India’s top oil suppliers May 17, 2022
  • West conducting war against Russia – Kremlin May 17, 2022
  • NATO issues response to Turkish terrorism concerns May 17, 2022
  • ATP makes decision on UK events after Russian ban May 17, 2022
  • Bezos and White House trade jibes over inflation May 17, 2022

RSS RT: USA News

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RSS Sail Transport Network

  • We Did It: Sailing Cargo in the Aegean July 18, 2017
  • Cure for Depending on 90K Oil Spewing Cargo Ships: Sail Power Makes Inroads, Now in Mediterranean June 15, 2017
  • Dirty Fossil Fuel ‘Business-As-Usual’ Tactics Spew Out of the IMO at COP22 November 10, 2016

RSS Science-Based Life

  • Sciencey Stuff You May Have Missed: Week 22 June 1, 2015
  • Sciencey Stuff You May Have Missed: Week 21 May 25, 2015
  • Sciencey Stuff You May Have Missed: Week 20 May 18, 2015

RSS ScienceDaily: Top Environment News

  • Scientists provide more than 50K camera trap images for massive study on Amazon wildlife May 16, 2022
  • Assessing the impact of loss mechanisms in solar cell candidate May 16, 2022
  • Policymakers underestimate methane's climate and air quality impacts May 16, 2022
  • The European drought event from 2018 to 2020 was the most intense in over 250 years May 16, 2022
  • Amazon deforestation threatens newly discovered fish species in Brazil May 16, 2022
  • CRISPR now possible in cockroaches May 16, 2022

RSS ScienceDaily: Top Science News

  • Jellyfish's stinging cells hold clues to biodiversity May 12, 2022
  • A first: Scientists grow plants in soil from the Moon May 12, 2022
  • Astronomers reveal first image of the black hole at the heart of our galaxy May 12, 2022
  • A brain circuit in the thalamus helps us hold information in mind May 12, 2022
  • Only 10 vaquita porpoises survive, but species may not be doomed, scientists say May 5, 2022
  • Lunar soil has the potential to generate oxygen and fuel May 5, 2022