UK Foreign Secretary David Lammy, addressing the UN Conference on The Peaceful Settlement of the Question of Palestine and the Implementation of the Two-State Solution, said it was “660 days since the Israeli hostages were first cruelly taken by Hamas terrorists. There is no possible justification for this suffering.” Lammy had spent most of that time deliberately misinterpreting the Genocide Convention and insisting that no genocide was being committed.

“Our support for Israel, its right to exist and the security of its people is steadfast,” he said. Considering Israel’s massacres and other crimes against humanity since the first day of its statehood in 1948 this frequently repeated statement has never convinced anyone.

“However, the Balfour declaration came with the solemn promise ‘that nothing shall be done, nothing which may prejudice the civil and religious rights’ of the Palestinian people’…. This has not been upheld and it is a historical injustice which continues to unfold.” True, but he misquotes Balfour even here. That part of the declaration actually reads: “… it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine….”

The Balfour declaration also came with dire warnings. Lord Edwin Montagu, the only Jew in the Cabinet at the time, called Zionism “a mischievous political creed, untenable by any patriotic citizen of the United Kingdom”. Lord Sydenham remarked: “What we have done, by concessions not to the Jewish people but to a Zionist extreme section, is to start a running sore in the East, and no-one can tell how far that sore will extend.”

Well, we know now. And it will stain Britain’s reputation forever.

Lammy continued: “Hamas must never be rewarded for its monstrous attack on October 7.” Of course, he said nothing about Israel having been continuously rewarded for its monstrous attacks on Palestinians over the last 77 years and will likely be rewarded again for its genocide.

“It [Hamas] must immediately release the hostages, agree to an immediate ceasefire, accept it will have no role in governing Gaza and commit to disarmament.” Coincidentally Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Egypt have also called on Hamas to disband. Along with a number of other countries they’ve just signed a statement saying, “Hamas must end its rule in Gaza and hand over its weapons to the Palestinian Authority, with international engagement and support, in line with the objective of a sovereign and independent Palestinian State.” Quite how this squares with international law isn’t clear, and no-one explains. It is for the Palestinian people to decide who governs their sovereign state.

Lammy: “His Majesty’s Government therefore intends to recognise the State of Palestine when the UN General Assembly gathers in September…. unless the Israeli government acts to end the appalling situation in Gaza, ends its military campaign and commits to a long-term sustainable peace based on a two-state solution. Our demands on Hamas also remain absolute and unwavering.” So what happens if Israel actually complies, or appears to comply? Does HMG then see no reason to recognise statehood? That would suit Israel very well. Note that there’s no requirement in all this for Israel to immediately end its illegal occupation of Palestinian territories, which is central to the whole problem. So the Starmer-Lammy proposal purposely misses the point.

Lammy maintains “there is no better vision for the future of the region than two states. Israelis living within secure borders, recognised and at peace with their neighbours, free from the threat of terrorism. And Palestinians living in their own state, in dignity and security, free of occupation.” Just a minute: how about Palestinians, whose land this is, “living within secure borders, free from the threat of Israeli terrorism and occupation”, the terrorists being (as if he didn’t know) the Israelis and their backers the US? Furthermore, UK leaders have banged the drum about a two-state solution for decades without ever describing what it would look like – especially now that Israel has been allowed to establish irreversible ‘facts on the ground’ that make a proper, workable Palestinian state almost impossible.

“The decades-long conflict between Israelis and Palestinians cannot be managed or contained,” he says. True, and that’s been obvious for decades.

“It must now be resolved.” True, and that too has been obvious for decades.

That same day, 29 July, Prime Minister Starmer was delivering “words on Gaza” from Downing Street.

“On the 7th of October 2023 Hamas perpetrated the worst massacre in Israel’s history. Every day since then, the horror has continued.” He makes it sound like the 660 days of horror have been Hamas’s doing.

“Ceasefire must be sustainable and it must lead to a wider peace plan, which we are developing with our international partners. This plan will deliver security and proper governance in Gaza and pave the way for negotiations on a Two State Solution”. Yes, but under international law Palestinians should not have to ‘negotiate’ their freedom and independence, it’s theirs by right regardless of what other nations think or say.

“Our goal remains a safe and secure Israel, alongside a viable and sovereign Palestinian state.” Oh dear, the same old lopsided spiel. Parity isn’t on the West’s agenda.

“Now, in Gaza because of a catastrophic failure of aid, we see starving babies, children too weak to stand: Images that will stay with us for a lifetime.” The horror is not due to “a catastrophic failure of aid” but failure over the years to end Israel’s illegal occupation and, in particular, its cruel 18-year siege and blockade of Gaza and the sickening practice of ‘mowing the grass’. The UK especially has been complicit in enabling Israel to maintain its stranglehold.

Starmer: “I’ve always said we will recognise a Palestinian state as a contribution to a proper peace process, at the moment of maximum impact for the Two State Solution.” UK governments have been saying that for years. Britain was supposed to grant Palestinians provisional statehood under its Mandate responsibilities back in 1923 and failed to do so. We’ve been ducking the issue ever since while eagerly recognising Israeli statehood with their terrorist militia and Ben-Gurion’s plan to take over the entire Holy Land by force.

“This is the moment to act,” Starmer continued. “So today – as part of this process towards peace I can confirm the UK will recognise the state of Palestine by the United Nations General Assembly in September unless the Israeli government takes substantive steps to end the appalling situation in Gaza, agree to a ceasefire and commit to a long-term, sustainable peace, reviving the prospect of a Two State Solution. And this includes allowing the UN to restart the supply of aid, and making clear there will be no annexations in the West Bank.” This is unbelievable vague and gives Israel endless wriggle-room. Much of the West Bank, of course, is already annexed. To give peace any kind of chance conditions must include Israel withdrawing its squatters, quitting all annexed lands and ending its illegal military occupation forthwith.

Starmer ends with the familiar mantra: “Our message to the terrorists of Hamas is unchanged and unequivocal. They must immediately release all the hostages, sign up to a ceasefire, disarm and accept that they will play no part in the government of Gaza.” No mention of the Israeli terrorists disarming and no ban on Likud (Netanyahu’s demented party) from any future government of Israel.

Starmer and Lammy never use the terms ‘international law’ or ‘justice’. Don’t they understand that there can be no peace without justice? Perhaps they do but won’t admit it because their friends and allies Israel and the US, for selfish strategic reasons, don’t want peace and never have.

Starmer and Lammy compromised and untrustworthy

Starmer told The Times of Israel, “I support Zionism without qualification”. Lammy has made similar declarations. The Ministerial Code and Principles of Public Life state very clearly (seer ‘Integrity’): “Holders of public office should not place themselves under any financial or other obligation to outside individuals or organisations that might seek to influence them in the performance of their official duties.” How do they get away with it?

So it’s hardly surprising that Lammy and Starmer show no concern for the 7,200 Palestinian hostages, including 88 women and 250 children, held in Israeli jails on 7 October under appalling conditions. Over 1,200 were under ‘administrative detention’ without charge or trial and denied ‘due process’. Or the fact that in the 23 years up to October 7 Israel had been slaughtering Palestinians at the rate of 8:1 and children at the rate of 16:1. Actual figures: Palestinians killed by Israelis 10,651 including 2,270 children and 6,656 women. Israelis killed by Palestinians 1,330 including 145 children and 261 women (source: Israel’s B’Tselem). Were they and their friends in Israel expecting Palestinians to take all that lying down?

Our dynamic duo were not so appalled by the sight of “starving babies and children too weak to stand” that they provided protection for the British-flagged aid vessel Madleen and the Handala bringing much-needed supplies to Gaza. They allowed these vessels to be hijacked in international waters, their cargo stolen and crews abducted by Israel’s thugs, just as the Mavi Marmara, the Al-Awda and other mercy ships had been similarly assaulted. Israeli piracy is the new normal in the eastern Mediterranean and Western nations don’t give a damn. The British government are more than happy, though, to instruct the RAF to fly surveillance missions over Gaza in support of Israel’s genocide programme and to continue sharing intelligence with the apartheid regime.

And if their concerns about the suffering and devastation were ever genuine, why didn’t they proposed forming a UN multi-nation intervention force to take over the Gaza crossings to ensure aid gets through as it should? They have now been shamed and their ‘no genocide’ stance utterly discredited by two of Israel’s own human rights organisations – B’Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights – who declare that Israel is indeed committing genocide in Gaza and its Western allies have a legal and moral duty to put a stop to it. B’Tselem’s summing-up of the situation is worth sharing:

Since October 2023, Israel has shifted its policy toward the Palestinians. Its military onslaught on Gaza, underway for more than 21 months, has included mass killing, both directly and through creating unlivable conditions, serious bodily or mental harm to an entire population, decimation of basic infrastructure throughout the Strip, and forcible displacement on a huge scale, with ethnic cleansing added to the list of official war objectives.

This is compounded by mass arrests and abuse of Palestinians in Israeli prisons, which have effectively become torture camps, and tearing apart the social fabric of Gaza, including the destruction of Palestinian educational and cultural institutions. The campaign is also an assault on Palestinian identity itself, through the deliberate destruction of refugee camps and attempts to undermine the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA).

An examination of Israel’s policy in the Gaza Strip and its horrific outcomes, together with statements by senior Israeli politicians and military commanders about the goals of the attack, leads to the unequivocal conclusion that Israel is taking coordinated, deliberate action to destroy Palestinian society in the Gaza Strip. In other words: Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.

The term genocide refers to a socio-historical and political phenomenon involving acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group. Both morally and legally, genocide cannot be justified under any circumstance, including as an act of self-defense.

Genocide always occurs within a context: there are conditions that enable it, triggering events, and a guiding ideology. The current onslaught on the Palestinian people, including in the Gaza Strip, must be understood in the context of more than seventy years in which Israel has imposed a violent and discriminatory regime on the Palestinians, taking its most extreme form against those living in the Gaza Strip. Since the State of Israel was established, the apartheid and occupation regime has institutionalized and systematically employed mechanisms of violent control, demographic engineering, discrimination, and fragmentation of the Palestinian collective. These foundations laid by the regime are what made it possible to launch a genocidal attack on the Palestinians immediately after the Hamas-led attack on 7 October 2023.

The assault on Palestinians in Gaza cannot be separated from the escalating violence being inflicted, at varying levels and in different forms, on Palestinians living under Israeli rule in the West Bank and within Israel. The violence and destruction in these areas is intensifying over time, with no effective domestic or international mechanism acting to halt them. We warn of the clear and present danger that the genocide will not remain confined to the Gaza Strip, and that the actions and underlying mindset driving it may be extended to other areas as well.

The recognition that the Israeli regime is committing genocide in the Gaza Strip, and the deep concern that it may expand to other areas where Palestinians live under Israeli rule, demand urgent and unequivocal action from both Israeli society and the international community, and use of every means available under international law to stop Israel’s genocide against the Palestinian people.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Stuart Littlewood.

Tribes can issue emergency declarations requests to open up help from regional and federal partners, typically 24 hours after the event. When help is authorized to arrive, emergency management systems tend to move slowly and may be staffed with volunteers juggling multiple roles in a new command to get aid directly to people. To help you prepare and stay safe, Grist has put together a toolkit to outline what Native people and their tribal governments should do to receive aid when natural disasters hit.

Jump to:

↓ How to find accurate information
↓ Preparing for a disaster
↓ How disaster response works for tribes
↓ Finding shelter and staying safe

How to find accurate information

Many people find out about disasters in their area via social media. But it’s important to make sure the information you’re receiving is correct. Below is a list of reliable sources to check for emergency alerts, updates, and more.

Your local emergency manager: This year, New Mexico and Arizona joined three other states (California, Colorado, and Washington) to create laws that establish “Feather Alerts” — public safety operations that many consider Native versions of AMBER alerts. This requires multiple jurisdictions to work together with preparedness in mind for when large-scale emergencies need to alert every cell phone in a region. Call a local nonemergency line and ask if your tribe has an emergency management department that operates police, fire, or hospital services. A simple call or visit to any tribal administration office can also help confirm if this is the case. Many tribal nations apply for federal or state grants in collaboration with other local governments.

From there, ask if you can sign up for any text alerts, emails, or an automated phone call service. For example, Navajo Nation has a text service: Text “NavajoNation” to 888-777. (These alerts can also be useful to learn about road closures, ceremonial events, and weather outside of a disaster.) 

Some alerts go to specific ZIP codes, or to people who receive tribal benefits like housing or senior services. Schools opt-in parents for campus alerts at both tribally run schools and campuses run by the Bureau of Indian Affairs (which can be another resource to get alerts).  Emergency managers are responsible for communicating with the public about disasters, managing rescue and response efforts, and coordinating among different agencies. They usually have an SMS-based emergency alert system, so sign up for those texts now. Many emergency management agencies are active on Facebook, so check there for updates, like livestreamed press conferences that give operational status updates and share resources for shelter and other aid.

If you’re having trouble finding your local department, you can search for your state or territory. We also suggest typing your city or county name followed by “emergency management” into Google. In larger cities, it’s often a separate agency; in smaller communities, fire chiefs or sheriff’s offices may manage emergency response and alerts.

National Weather Service: This agency, also called NWS, is part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA, and offers information and updates on everything from wildfires to hurricanes to air quality. You can enter your ZIP code on weather.gov and customize your homepage to get the most updated weather information and receive alerts for a variety of weather conditions. The NWS also has regional and local branches where you can sign up for SMS alerts. Local alerts in multiple languages are available in some areas.

If you’re in a rural area or somewhere that isn’t highlighted on the agency’s maps, keep an eye out for local alerts and evacuation orders. NWS may not have as much information ahead of time in these areas because there often aren’t as many weather-monitoring stations.

Read more: How to get reliable information before and during a disaster

Local news: The local television news and social media accounts from verified news sources will have live updates during and after a disaster. Meteorologists on your local news station use NWS weather data. Follow your local newspaper and television station on Facebook or other social media, or check their websites regularly. If you don’t have cable, these stations often livestream online for free during severe weather. 

Weather stations and apps: The Weather Channel, Accuweather, Apple Weather, and Google, which all rely on NWS weather data, will have information on major storms and other extreme weather events. That may not be the case for smaller-scale weather events, and you shouldn’t rely on these apps to tell you if you need to evacuate or move to higher ground. Instead, check your local news broadcast on television or radio.

Read more: What disasters are and how they’re officially declared

Tribes with police or fire agencies must have emergency management plans in place and are another resource for information on a tribe’s response plan. Disasters often bring first responders from elsewhere; checking in with the ones who serve the community are going to be the most useful on-the-ground resource for families with limited access to transportation or technology like the internet or cell phones.

Preparing for a disaster

As you prepare for a disaster, it’s important to have an emergency kit ready in case you lose power or need to leave your home. These can often be expensive to create, so contact your local disaster aid organizations, houses of worship, tribal leaders, or charities to see if there are free or affordable kits available — or buy one or two items every time you’re at the grocery store. 

Here are some of the most important things to have in your kit. You can read more details about how to prepare safely here. 

• Water (1 gallon per person per day for several days)
• Food (at least a several-day supply of nonperishable food) and a can opener
• Medicines and documentation of your medical needs
• Identification and proof of residency documents (see a more detailed list here)
• A flashlight 
• A battery-powered or hand-crank radio
• Backup batteries
• Blanket and sleeping bag
• Change of clothes and closed-toed shoes
• First-aid kit (the Red Cross has a list of what to include)
• N95 masks, hand sanitizer, and trash bags 
• If you have babies or children: diapers, wipes, and food or formula
• If you have pets: food, collar, leash, and any medicines needed

Read more: How to stay safe if you’re feeling exhausted or ill

How disaster response works for tribes

When a major disaster hits, your tribal government will communicate with the Federal Emergency Management Agency to apply for immediate aid as well as support for services that seek to mitigate future disasters. Here’s how that works:

There is a specific process cities, states, and tribal governments must navigate in order for residents to receive FEMA aid. FEMA has 10 regions that support tribes during disaster response. If your tribal nation’s lands cross multiple FEMA regions, identify which FEMA region the headquarters is located to determine whom to contact. Here is a map with a list of contacts.

FEMA updated its tribal policy in 2020, with the following guidance for its employees and contractors: Maintain tribal government relationships, consider unique community circumstances, and build tribal capacity through educational and technical assistance programs. It was updated again in December 2024 after FEMA held nine listening and consultation sessions with 118 tribal nations in all 10 regions the agency oversees. 

In 2025, FEMA changed that policy to empower “tribal nations’ sovereignty and access to federal assistance, thereby enhancing their response and recovery efforts and improving community and tribal community members’ outcomes.”

Here are other recent changes to the FEMA Tribal Policy:

• The policy gives power to tribes to define “tribal community member” when offering individual assistance to ensure “their full community is served.” This could reduce barriers for help to people not enrolled in the tribe to receive federal emergency funds for food, shelter, and reimbursements.
• Rebuilding tribal homes after a disaster also changed: When public assistance is approved, the federal government will automatically recommend that it takes on 98 percent of the cost when the total reaches $200,000. This means tribes could pay less for approved recovery and, as FEMA summarized from its tribal listening sessions, “provide more certainty for non-federal cost shares to tribal nations.”

Read more: How to navigate the FEMA aid process

State-recognized tribes

Tribes that are not federally recognized may encounter more red tape when trying to access government aid because they don’t have a direct relationship with FEMA. For example, the Grand Caillou/Dulac Band of Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw struggled to get aid after Hurricane Ida in 2021.

According to a June 2020 FEMA policy, state-recognized tribes should be treated as local governments, rather than tribal governments with a nation-to-nation relationship with the federal government. This way, they can access both individual assistance if there is a major disaster declaration in their state, as well as public assistance for infrastructure repair.

Tribal and state collaboration

Partnerships between local tribes and states or cities they border are essential for how Native nations and people move disaster aid and recovery. For example, a deadly Oklahoma wildfire in March gave some insight into how FEMA’s local partnerships work in a state with prominent tribal jurisdictional maps and people who live both in and outside the communities.

Last year, Oklahoma created rules for its State Assistance Dedicated for Disaster-Impacted Local Economies Revolving Fund, which takes federal disaster money, approves requests for aid, and pays Oklahomans directly with loans for long-term recovery projects.

There is a growing number of coalitions focused on relationships among tribes to promote a more collaborative approach. For example, Oklahoma has had the Inter-Tribal Emergency Management Coalition since 2004 and meets regularly to discuss emergency preparedness.

Read more: How to find housing and rebuild your home after a disaster

Finding shelter and staying safe

Emergency shelters can be set up in established tribal spaces, like school gymnasiums, powwow grounds, and hospitals. Tribal senior services and schools have the most up-to-date records of people and organizations in the community and are tapped by emergency management teams for welfare checks and transportation needs. Hospital services can also be key to prescriptions and other medical needs.

In the same way that cousins and relatives are expected to offer a home to rest, tribal citizens now have the expectation for their tribal government to give full immediate aid and help in recovery.

FEMA recovery centers

FEMA disaster recovery centers provide information about the agency’s programs as well as other state and local resources, and are opened in impacted areas in the days and weeks following a federally declared disaster. FEMA representatives can help navigate the aid application process or direct you to nonprofits, shelters, or state and local resources. Go to this website to locate one in your area, or text DRC and a ZIP code to 43362.

Community organizations and nonprofits

Here are some organizations focused on emergency management for Indigenous communities:

• Partnership with Native Americans has a disaster relief service and fund that helps displaced people, sets up supplies for shelters, and more. They coordinate with local groups as well as the Red Cross. 
• Northern Plains Reservation Aid, Southwest Reservation Aid, Native American Aid, Navajo Relief Fund, Sioux Nation Relief Fund, and Southwest Indian Relief Council are groups that offer direct aid to the regions they can serve. They can also be a direct resource for state-recognized tribes.

Read more: How to access food before, during, and after a disaster

More resources

Here are a few organizations that have newsletters, workshops, and other resources for tribal communities across the country.

• The Tribal Emergency Management Association, or iTEMA, is a “national association created for Indian Country, by Indian Country” that promotes a collaborative approach to disasters that impact tribal communities. They offer workshops and resources for tribal leaders, emergency managers, and other interested people. 
• Hazard Mitigation Planning through FEMA is essential. How to keep up with federal grant deadlines and policy directives can be navigated by the Pacific Northwest Tribal Climate Change Project: The online resource hosted by the University of Oregon is an example of tribal regional planning, with foundational support from the Nespelem Tribe in northern Washington. 
• The Regional Tribal Emergency Management Summit in May brought direct sources to South Dakota on what to expect in the next year. Access to presentations, other resources, and a list of other events is available on their site.
• The Red Guide to Recovery is another example of tribes networking with outside community groups in California. The National Tribal Emergency Management Council is listed as a partner.

Download a PDF of this article | Return to Disaster 101

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline How tribes navigate emergency response aid to citizens and what you can do to prepare on Jul 28, 2025.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Shaun Griswold.

This article is co-published with The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan local newsroom that informs and engages with Texans. Sign up for The Brief Weekly to get up to speed on their essential coverage of Texas issues.

Sixteen months had passed since Hurricane Harvey tore through the Texas coast in August 2017, killing more than 80 people and flattening entire neighborhoods. And when Texas lawmakers gathered in Austin for their biennial session, the scale of the storm’s destruction was hard to ignore.

Legislators responded by greenlighting a yearslong statewide initiative to evaluate flood risks and improve preparedness for increasingly frequent and deadly storms. “If we get our planning right on the front end and prevent more damage on the front end, then we have less on the back end,” Charles Perry, a Republican senator from Lubbock who chairs a committee overseeing environmental issues, said at the time.

In the years that followed, hundreds of local officials and volunteers canvassed communities across Texas, mapping out vulnerabilities. The result of their work came in 2024 with the release of Texas’ first-ever state flood plan.

Their findings identified nearly $55 billion in proposed projects and outlined 15 key recommendations, including nine suggestions for legislation. Several were aimed at aiding rural communities like Kerr County, where flash flooding over the Fourth of July weekend killed more than 100 people. Three are still missing.

But this year, lawmakers largely ignored those recommendations.

Instead, the legislative session that ended June 2 was dominated by high-profile battles over school vouchers and lawmakers’ decision to spend $51 billion to maintain and provide new property tax cuts, an amount nearly equal to the funding identified by the Texas Water Development Board, a state agency that has historically overseen water supply and conservation efforts.

Although it had been only seven years since Hurricane Harvey, legislators now prioritized the state’s water and drought crisis over flooding needs.

Legislators allocated more than $1.6 billion in new revenue for water infrastructure projects, only some of which would go toward flood mitigation. They also passed a bill that will ask voters in November to decide whether to approve $1 billion annually over the next two decades that would prioritize water and wastewater over flood mitigation projects. At that pace, water experts said that it could take decades before existing mitigation needs are addressed — even without further floods.

Even if they had been approved by lawmakers this year, many of the plan’s recommendations would not have been implemented before the July 4 disaster. But a ProPublica and Texas Tribune analysis of legislative proposals, along with interviews with lawmakers and flood experts, found that the Legislature has repeatedly failed to enact key measures that would help communities prepare for frequent flooding.

Such inaction often hits rural and economically disadvantaged communities hardest because they lack the tax base to fund major flood prevention projects and often cannot afford to produce the data they need to qualify for state and federal grants, environmental experts and lawmakers said.

Over the years, legislators have declined to pass at least three bills that would create siren or alert systems, tools experts say can be especially helpful in rural communities that lack reliable internet and cell service. A 2019 state-commissioned report estimated flood prevention needs at over $30 billion. Since then, lawmakers have allocated just $1.4 billion. And they ignored the key recommendations from the state’s 2024 flood plan that are meant to help rural areas like Kerr County, which is dubbed “Flash Flood Alley” due to its geography.

Spokespeople for Gov. Greg Abbott and House Speaker Dustin Burrows, R-Lubbock, did not answer questions about why the plan’s recommendations were overlooked but defended the Legislature’s investment in flood mitigation as significant. They pointed to millions more spent on other prevention efforts, including flood control dam construction and maintenance, regional flood projects, and increased floodplain disclosures and drainage requirements for border counties. Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick did not respond to questions.

This week, the Legislature will convene for a special session that Abbott called to address a range of priorities, including flood warning systems, natural disaster preparation and relief funding. Patrick promised that the state would purchase warning sirens for counties in flash flood zones. Similar efforts, however, have previously been rejected by the Legislature. Alongside Burrows, Patrick also announced the formation of committees on disaster preparedness and flooding and called the move “just the beginning of the Legislature looking at every aspect of this tragic event.” Burrows said the House is “ready to better fortify our state against future disasters.”

But Rep. Ana-María Rodríguez Ramos, a Democrat from Richardson, near Dallas, said state lawmakers have brushed off dire flood prevention needs for decades.

“The manual was there, and we ignored it, and we've continued to ignore these recommendations,” said Rodríguez Ramos, who has served on the House Natural Resources Committee overseeing water issues for three sessions. “It’s performative to say we’re trying to do something knowing well we’re not doing enough.”

One recommendation from the 2024 flood plan would have cost the state nothing to enact. It called for granting counties the authority to levy drainage fees, including in unincorporated areas, that could fund local flood projects. Only about 150 of 1,450 Texas cities and counties have dedicated drainage fees, according to a study cited in the state assessment.

Kerr, a conservative county of 53,000 people, has struggled to gain support for projects that would raise taxes. About a week after the flooding, some residents protested when county commissioners discussed a property tax increase to help cover the costs of recovery efforts.

The inability to raise such fees is one of the biggest impediments for local governments seeking to fund flood mitigation projects, said Robert R. Puente, a Democrat and former state representative who once chaired the state committee responsible for water issues. Lawmakers’ resistance to such efforts is rooted in fiscal conservatism, said Puente, who now heads the San Antonio Water System.

“It’s mostly because of a philosophy that the leadership in Austin has right now, that under no circumstances are we going to raise taxes, and under most circumstances we’re not even going to allow local governments to have control over how they raise taxes or implement fees,” he said.

Another one of the flood plan’s recommendations called for lawmakers to allocate money for a technical assistance program to help underresourced and rural governments better manage flood prone areas, which requires implementing a slew of standards to ensure safe development in those hazardous zones. Doing this work requires local officials to collect accurate mapping that shows the risk of flooding. Passing this measure could have helped counties like Kerr with that kind of data collection, which the plan recognized is especially challenging for rural and economically disadvantaged communities.

Insufficient information impacts Texas’s ability to fully understand flood risks statewide. The water board’s plan, for example, includes roughly 600 infrastructure projects across Texas in need of completion. But its report acknowledged that antiquated or missing data meant another 3,100 assessments would be required to know whether additional projects are needed.

In the Guadalupe River region, which includes Kerr County, 65% of areas lacked adequate flood mapping. Kerrville, the county seat, was listed among the areas identified as having the “greatest known flood risks and mitigation needs.” Yet of the 19 flood needs specific to the city and county, only three were included in the state plan’s list of 600. They included requests to install backup generators in critical facilities and repair low-water crossings, which are shallow points in streets where rainwater can pool to dangerous levels.

At least 16 other priorities, including the county’s desire for an early warning flood system and potential dam or drainage system repairs, required a follow-up evaluation, according to the state plan. County officials tried to obtain grants for the early warning systems for years, to no avail.

Gonzales County, an agriculture-rich area of 20,000 people along the Guadalupe River, is among the rural communities struggling to obtain funding, said emergency management director Jimmy Harless, who is also the county’s fire marshal. The county is in desperate need of a siren system and additional gauges to measure the river’s potentially dangerous flood levels, Harless said, but doesn’t have the resources, personnel or expertise to apply for the “burdensome” state grant process.

“It is extremely frustrating for me to know that there’s money there and there’s people that care, but our state agency has become so bureaucratic that it’s just not feasible for us,” Harless said. “Our folks’ lives are more important than what some bureaucrat wants us to do.”

For years, Texas leaders have focused more on cleaning up after disasters than on preparing for them, said Jim Blackburn, a professor at Rice University specializing in environmental law and flooding issues.

“It’s no secret that the Guadalupe is prone to flash flooding. That’s been known for decades,” Blackburn said. “The state has been very negligent about kind of preparing us for, frankly, the worst storms of the future that we are seeing today because of climate change, and what’s changing is that the risks are just greater today and will be even greater tomorrow, because our storms are getting worse and worse.”

At a news conference this month, Abbott said state committees would investigate “ways to address this,” though he declined to offer specifics. When pressed by a reporter about where the blame for the lack of preparedness should fall, Abbott responded that it was “the word choice of losers.”

It shouldn’t have taken the Hill Country flooding for a special session addressing emergency systems and funding needs, said Usman Mahmood, a policy analyst at Bayou City Waterkeeper, a Houston nonprofit that advocates for flood protection measures.

“The worst part pretty much already happened, which is the flooding and the loss of life,” he said. “Now it’s a reaction to that.”

Misty Harris contributed research.

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Lexi Churchill and Lomi Kriel, ProPublica and The Texas Tribune.

Here’s a toolkit to help you get started.

Jump to:

↓ Where to find accurate information
↓ How to pack an emergency kit
↓ Power outage safety
↓ Planning an evacuation route
↓ Protecting and preparing your home

Where to find accurate information

Many people find out about disasters in their area via social media. But it’s important to make sure the information you’re receiving is correct. Below is a list of reliable sources to check for emergency alerts, updates, and more.

Your local emergency manager: Your city or county has an emergency management department, which is part of the local government. Emergency managers are responsible for communicating with the public about disasters, managing rescue and response efforts, and coordinating between different agencies. They usually have an SMS-based emergency alert system, so sign up for those texts now. (Note: Some cities have multiple languages available, but most emergency alerts are only in English.) Many emergency management agencies are active on Facebook, so check there for updates as well.

If you’re having trouble finding your local department, you can search for your state or territory. We also suggest typing your city or county name followed by “emergency management” into Google. In larger cities, it’s often a separate agency; in smaller communities, fire chiefs or sheriff’s offices may manage emergency response and alerts.

National Weather Service: This agency, called NWS, is part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA, and offers information and updates on everything from wildfires to hurricanes to air quality. You can enter your zip code on weather.gov and customize your homepage to get the most updated weather information and receive alerts for a variety of weather conditions. The NWS also has regional and local branches where you can sign up for SMS alerts. Local alerts in multiple languages are available in some areas.

If you’re in a rural area or somewhere that isn’t highlighted on the agency’s maps, keep an eye out for local alerts and evacuation orders. NWS may not have as much information ahead of time in these areas because there often aren’t as many weather monitoring stations.

Watch vs. warning: You’ll often see meteorologists refer to storm or fire watches or warnings. If there is a “watch,” that means the conditions are ripe for extreme weather. A wildfire watch means “critical fire weather conditions are possible but not imminent or occurring,” according to NOAA. A warning, however, means the threat is more imminent and you should be prepared to take shelter or evacuate if told to. For instance, a wildfire warning is set when fire conditions are “ongoing or expected to occur shortly.”

You can track extreme weather via these websites:

• The National Interagency Fire Center tracks wildfires around the country.
• This ArcGIS fire tracker uses government data to pinpoint fire activity across the country.
• The National Hurricane Center tracks hurricanes in the Central Pacific, Eastern Pacific, and Atlantic Oceans.
• The National Weather Service active alerts page monitors severe weather by state, region, and type.

Local news: The local television news and social media accounts from verified news sources will have live updates during and after a storm. Meteorologists on your local news station use NWS weather data. Follow your local newspaper and television station on Facebook or other social media, or check their websites regularly. If you don’t have cable, these stations often livestream online for free during severe weather.

Weather stations and apps: The Weather Channel, Accuweather, Apple Weather, and Google, which all rely on NWS weather data, will have information on major storms. That may not be the case for smaller-scale weather events, and you shouldn’t rely on these apps to tell you if you need to evacuate or move to higher ground. Instead, check your local news broadcast on television or radio, or check NWS.

Read more: What disasters are and how they’re officially declared

How to pack an emergency kit

As you prepare for a disaster, it’s important to have an emergency kit ready in case you lose power or need to leave your home. Review this checklist from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, for what to pack so you can stay safe, hydrated, and healthy. (FEMA has these resources available in multiple languages here.)

These can often be expensive to create, so contact your local disaster aid organizations, houses of worship, or charities to see if there are free or affordable kits available — or buy one or two items every time you’re at the grocery store. Ideally, this will be packed well in advance of hurricane or fire season, so gather as much as you can ahead of time in case shelves are empty when a storm is on the way.

FEMA has activities for kids to make this process more fun; the ASPCA also has useful guidelines for people with pets.

Here are some of the most important things to have in your kit:

• A list of phone numbers for your city or county emergency services, police departments, local hospitals, and health departments
• Water (one gallon per person per day for several days)
• Food (at least a several-day supply of non-perishable food) and a can opener
• Medicines and documentation of your medical needs
• Identification and proof of residency documents (see a more detailed list below)
• A flashlight
• A battery-powered or hand crank radio
• Backup batteries
• Blanket(s) and sleeping bags
• Change of clothes and closed-toed shoes
• First aid kit (The Red Cross has a list of what to include)
• N-95 masks, hand sanitizer, and trash bags
• Wrench or pliers
• Cell phone with chargers and a backup battery
• If you have babies or children: diapers, wipes, and food or formula
• If you have pets: food, collar, leash, and any medicines needed

Wirecutter, Wired, Popular Mechanics, and some other news outlets have “best of” lists for many of these items, where you can find different price points and features. You can also find reviews on Consumer Reports.

Don’t forget: Documents

One of the most important things to have in your emergency kit is documents you may need to prove your residence, demonstrate extent of damage, and to vote. FEMA often requires you to provide these documents in order to receive financial assistance after a disaster. Keep these items in a water- and fire-proof folder or container. You can find more details about why you may need these documents here.

• Government-issued ID, such as a drivers’ license, for each member of your household
• Proof of citizenship or legal residency for each member of your household (passport, green card, etc.)
• Social Security card for each member of your household
• Documentation of your medical needs, including medications or special equipment (oxygen tanks, wheelchairs, etc.)
• Health insurance card
• Car title and registration documents
• Pre-disaster photos of the inside and outside of your house and belongings
• For homeowners: copies of your deed, mortgage information, and home insurance policy, if applicable
• For homeowners: copies of your deed, mortgage information, and flood insurance policy, if applicable
• For renters: a copy of your lease and renters insurance policy
• Financial documents such as a checkbook or voided check

Planning for people with disabilities

Disabled people have a right to all disaster alerts in a format that is accessible. The Partnership for Inclusive Disaster Strategies, a disability-led nonprofit focused on disasters, has a list of these rights. The organization also runs a hotline for any questions: (800) 626-4959 or hotline@disasterstrategies.org.

FEMA has a list of specific planning steps for people with disabilities. Some of these recommendations include:

• Contact your local emergency management office to ask about voluntary registries for people with disabilities to self-identify so they can access targeted assistance during emergencies and disasters.
• If you use medical equipment that requires electricity, ask your health care provider about what you may be able to do to keep it running during a power outage.
• Wear medical alert tags or bracelets. Also add pertinent medical information to your electronic devices.
• In your emergency kit, have your prescription information and medicines, as well as contact information for people who can help care for you or answer questions.

Power outage safety

You may experience a power outage before or during a disaster. Here are some ways to stay safe:

• Your utility company may alert you of changes, so sign up for texts, emails, or calls from them.
• If your power does go out, keep your refrigerator closed as much as possible and eat perishable food first. Get some coolers with ice if possible, and if you’re in doubt about any food, throw it out.
• Unplug appliances and electronics you don’t need, and use flashlights instead of candles to reduce the risk of fire.
• Do not use a gas stove to heat your home and do not use outdoor stoves inside. If you have a generator, keep it outside in a well ventilated area away from windows. The Red Cross has more generator safety tips.

Read more: How to access food before, during, and after a disaster

Planning an evacuation route

It is important to have a plan in case there’s an evacuation order in your area, or if you decide you want to evacuate on your own. FEMA has a list of key things to know when making an evacuation plan.

• Choose several places you could go in an emergency — maybe a friend or family member’s house in another city, or a hotel. Choose destinations in different directions so you have options. If you have pets, make sure the place you choose allows them, as shelters usually only allow service animals.
• Make sure you know several routes and other means of transportation out of your area, in case roads are closed.
• Keep a full tank of gas in your car if you know a disaster may be coming, and keep your emergency kit in your car or in an easily accessible place.
• Come up with a plan to stay in touch with members of your household in case you are separated. Check with your neighbors as well.
• Unplug electrical equipment, except for freezers and refrigerators, before you evacuate. If there’s already damage to your home in any way, shut off water, gas, and electricity.

Always heed the advice of local officials when it comes to evacuations. Your state or county may have specific routes and plans in case there are mandatory evacuations. For instance, Florida’s emergency management division has designated zones and routes across the state for hurricane evacuations. Los Angeles County has resources for different evacuation scenarios in case of wildfire.

Protecting and preparing your home

It’s impossible to know what might happen to your home during a disaster, but there are many best practices to keep your belongings and property as safe as possible.

The list below contains tips from several sources, including FEMA and the National Fire Protection Association, for protecting your home from wildfire.

• Equip an outdoor water source with a hose that can reach any area of your property.
• Create a fire-resistant zone that is free of leaves, debris, or flammable materials for at least 30 feet from your home.
• Clean roofs and gutters of dead leaves, debris, and pine needles.
• Clean debris from exterior attic vents and install ⅛-inch metal mesh screening to block embers.
• Move any flammable material, including mulch, flammable plants, leaves, pine needles, and firewood piles, away from walls. Remove anything stored underneath decks or porches.
• Designate a room that can be closed off from outside air. Close all doors and windows. Set up a portable air cleaner to keep indoor pollution levels low when smoky conditions exist.
• Use fire-resistant materials to build, renovate, or make repairs.

Below is a list of ways to protect your home from water and wind damage, gathered from the National Flood Insurance Program and local government sources.

• Move your most valued belongings to a high, safe place, such as an attic.
• Clear your gutters and downspouts when you know a big rain is coming, and make sure they’re pointed downhill, away from your home.
• Clear storm drains and drainage ditches of debris.
• Elevate your utilities, including electrical panels, propane tanks, sockets, wiring, appliances, and heating systems, if possible, and anchor them in place.
• Get a sump pump if you are a homeowner. A working sump pump and a water alarm can minimize flood damage in your basement. Install a battery-operated backup pump in case the power goes out.
• Get a sump pump if you are a homeowner. A working sump pump and a water alarm can minimize flood damage in your basement. Install a battery-operated backup pump in case the power goes out.
• Seal any cracks in your foundation with mortar, caulk, or hydraulic cement.
• Secure outdoor items so they don’t blow or wash away.
• If you’re in a hurricane-prone area, install storm shutters. There are many products for every budget; some are temporary and some are permanent.
• Secure loose roof shingles, which can create a domino effect if wind starts to take them off.

The list below contains tips from several sources, including FEMA and the U.S. Energy Department, on protecting your home from frigid temperatures.

• Clear debris and tree limbs, especially those hanging over your gutters or roof in case ice, wind, or snow knocks them down.
• Protect your pipes from cracking by detaching garden hoses before freezing weather begins. Leave your faucet dripping and open the cabinet doors under your sinks.
• Protect your pipes from cracking by detaching garden hoses before freezing weather begins. Leave your faucet dripping and open the cabinet doors under your sinks.
• Evaluate the insulation in your home. If you’re a renter and can’t do much to your space, there are affordable options like sealing gaps around windows with plastic or weather stripping, getting heavy curtains, and installing door sweeps or putting towels along the bottom of doors. If you’re a homeowner, you can do more permanent things like insulating floors, ducts, and attics, or caulking around windows and doors.

The list below contains tips from several sources, including FEMA and the American Lung Association, on protecting your home during heat waves.

• An affordable way to block sunlight from your windows is with blackout curtains or blinds. If you can install awnings or shutters, that can also help.
• If you’re a homeowner, you can invest in more energy-efficient appliances or install cool roofing.
• Don’t use heat-producing appliances on hot days. Dry your clothes outside instead of in the dryer, and microwave food to reduce oven use.
• Make sure your air filters are changed every six months, or even more frequently, to ensure your air conditioning works properly.
• Get some desk fans and box fans to circulate air.

Read more: How disaster response and recovery work

Download a PDF of this article | Return to Disaster 101

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline How to prepare for a disaster on Jul 7, 2025.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Lyndsey Gilpin.

The report, “Minimum Tax, Maximum Influence,” details an effort by Sen. James Lankford (R–Okla.) to allow U.S. oil and gas producers to escape the 15% corporate alternative minimum tax that was a cornerstone of the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act. This measure was designed to stop profitable corporations from taking advantage of loopholes to pay nothing or nearly nothing in taxes. The new report draws on investor calls and filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission to identify oil companies that may benefit from Sen.Lankford’s legislation.

Earlier this year, Lankford (R–Okla.) introduced the Promoting Domestic Energy Production Act, which would provide oil and gas drillers a special loophole to deduct certain drilling costs from taxes owed under the corporate minimum tax. Lankford’s proposal may be added to the mammoth Republican tax cut package benefitting the wealthiest Americans and large corporations while slashing health benefits for everyday Americans later this year.

“It is simply outrageous that the GOP is using its trifecta to create yet another fossil fuel subsidy,” said Lukas Shankar-Ross, deputy director of Friends of the Earth’s Climate and Energy Justice Program and co-author of the report. “If this polluter handout is snuck into the GOP tax bill, then cuts to Medicaid and food stamps could well pay for another giveaway to Big Oil. That’s obscene.”

If passed, this newest tax break would add to more than $170 billion in existing subsidies for fossil fuel companies.

“Oil and gas companies are using the political influence they purchased to dodge paying even a minimal part of their fair share,” said Alan Zibel, energy research director with Public Citizen and co-author of the report. “If individual taxpayers understood the magnitude of the extreme subsidies for Big Oil, they would be shocked. The newest effort to bypass even the most modest of tax bills by the industry is shocking, but sadly not surprising.”

Read the full report “Minimum Tax, Maximum Influence” here.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Newswire Editor.

As voters across the United States head to the polls, we speak with New York Times writer Jim Rutenberg about how Donald Trump may try to preemptively declare victory and challenge election results. The former president has ramped up claims Democrats are “a bunch of cheats” and preemptively cast doubt on a win by Vice President Kamala Harris, following a similar playbook as 2020 when he baselessly claimed the election was stolen. Rutenberg spoke to pro-Trump election officials in battleground states of Arizona, Georgia, Nevada and Pennsylvania who say they are ready to refuse to certify local election results as part of a wide-ranging effort to throw the system into disarray. Rutenberg says after the failed insurrection of January 6, 2021, many in Trump’s orbit had a clear goal for 2024: “We have to go local.” He also discusses the Electoral Count Reform Act of 2022 that makes it harder to stop the final certification of results.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

The vision

The old tree spoke:

Burr of blade and crash of trunk broke embraces held for centuries. My grove — seeded ere memory — found itself emptied of life by the sound and fury of saw.

Alone, I watched seasons grow erratic. Alone, I watched frost whip rathe flowers. Alone, I watched heat deepen and linger. Alone, I lost the hope to restore the grove.

Then, the humans returned. With spade in place of saw, they broke the ground again. In wounds reopened, they sowed you whose roots embrace all mine, you who taste of lands unknown.

Together, we might withstand these changes.

— a drabble by Syris Valentine

The spotlight

On a near cloudless August day, I arrived at a waist-high iron barrier gate in Washington’s Marckworth State Forest, accompanied by staff from the Mountains to Sound Greenway Trust, a Seattle-based nonprofit that conserves and restores land from the easternmost edge of the Cascade mountains to the Puget Sound — an area known as the Mountains to Sound Greenway National Heritage Area. In 1900, Weyerhaeuser — the second largest lumber company in North America — bought its first 900,000 acres of timberland in what, today, is the greenway. “The birth of industrial timber was right here,” said the trust’s executive director Jon Hoekstra, “for better or for worse.” For 35 years, Hoekstra said, conservation groups and nearby tribes have made intense efforts to knit the devastated forests back together through many different projects.

On this particular day, Kate Fancher, the trust’s restoration project manager, took me into the forest to the Stossel Creek reforestation site, which lies some 20 miles northeast of Seattle in the foothills of the Cascade mountains. Stossel Creek is unique among the roughly four dozen projects that the trust currently manages. Here, Fancher is overseeing a multiyear experiment on an urgent new approach to forest management: assisted migration. The strategy involves intentionally shifting the range of certain trees to make forests more resilient to climate change.

“I’m not used to doing this type of experiment. Normally it’s more informal,” she said. “But I think it’s really important to see what we can take away from this and then potentially tie that into our restoration work going forward.”

Fancher (right) walking to the Stossel Creek restoration site in August, along with Sarah Lemmon, a public relations consultant hired by the trust. Syris Valentine / Grist

For the last several decades, standard best practice for reforestation projects said to source native treelings from local nurseries that collect seed from nearby forests. Forest managers learned the hard way that locally sourced seedlings had a better chance of survival, forest geneticist Sally Aitken later told me. During early large-scale reforestation campaigns, seedlings sourced from native but nonlocal trees had a much harder time establishing themselves into environments they weren’t adapted to. Many died. Those that survived often failed to grow as tall or healthy as their locally sourced counterparts.

“Forest geneticists spent decades and decades convincing foresters that they should use local populations of trees to get their seed from for reforestation,” said Aitken, who has been studying the implications of climate change for trees since the early ’90s.

But as the changing climate has created both new extremes and a new normal outside of what local species evolved to withstand, some forest managers are championing an approach that replants with trees adapted not to the current climate, but to the future one.

While that can mean introducing species into ecosystems they have never before occupied, in most cases, like Stossel Creek, the species are the same ones already in the forest, but the individual seedlings are trucked in from other regions, selected based on the environments they’ve adapted to.

The trust and its partners seeded the Stossel Creek acreage with trees sourced from warmer, drier climes akin to what the Pacific Northwest can expect to experience in the future. Some of the 14,000 seedlings planted on the site traveled over 500 miles north from California to reach their new home.

This experiment emerged after Seattle City Light, the city’s electric utility, purchased 154 acres of land in 2015 that a logging company had clear-cut three years prior. City Light acquired the land to preserve salmon and steelhead habitat as part of its extensive commitments to environmental stewardship, and the utility partnered with the trust and several other organizations to coordinate a mass planting of climate-adapted trees in 2019. The hope is that by reseeding the lands with trees adapted to hotter and drier environs, interplanted among locally sourced seedlings, the emergent forest “will be more resilient to heat, drought, pests, disease, and wildfire,” said a report authored by Rowan Braybrook, the programs director at Northwest Natural Resource Group, one of the trust’s partners on the project.

To find out where to source trees that may be well-adapted to the future climate of this particular forest, the project’s designers used the Seedlot Selection Tool developed by the U.S. Forest Service, Oregon State University, and the Conservation Biology Institute. The tool allows researchers and practitioners to experiment with a wide range of scenarios to determine where they might source seeds for the climate scenario selected. In the case of Stossel Creek, the project designers looked at the worst-case climate projections for the next several decades to identify regions and nurseries in southern Oregon and Northern California that would provide the best seedstock.

The specific portions of those two states were selected based primarily on two measures: the “summer heat-moisture index,” to capture the increasing aridity of Northwest summers, and the “mean coldest month,” a key consideration because Douglas firs need a good winter chill to grow come spring. Selecting seedlings from across this range, Braybrook said, has allowed them to use the Stossel Creek experiment to “stress test” assisted migration.

“If you move too far, too fast,” Aitken said, “the biggest risk is cold damage.” While climate change is, on average, warming things up year over year, it has also made sudden and severe cold snaps more likely, which could damage or kill trees born for the California sun.

But after I walked around the Stossel Creek site itself with Fancher, weaving through rows of baby trees ringed by plastic mesh skirts to protect them from grazing elk and deer, and later reviewed the data collected in the four years after the big 2019 planting, I was surprised by how much the Douglas firs from California seem to love the new climate emerging in the western Cascade foothills.

Of the three seedlots — one each from Washington, Oregon, and California — the California Dougs have survived the best and grown the fastest, followed closely by the Oregon firs. On average, over 90 percent of the firs sourced from those southern neighbors survived through 2023. Meanwhile, those sourced from Washington’s own iconic evergreen forests have fared worse, with only 73 percent surviving, according to data collected through last September. According to a report published last year by the Northwest Natural Resource Group, it’s still too early to draw major conclusions from the experiment — but these early results seem to indicate that planting for the climate of the future could bolster reforestation efforts.

Left: A row of Douglas firs planted in one of Stossel Creek’s test plots leading to a weather station. Right: A shore pine planted beside a stump on one of the test plots. Syris Valentine / Grist

Despite the results from experiments like Stossel Creek, and others that have occurred in the Eastern U.S. as well as Canada and Mexico, assisted migration is still a controversial practice. “The Forest Service still requires us to use local seed stock for most of our restoration work,” Jon Hoekstra said, with the goal of preserving local adaptations. Hoekstra, Aitken, and others have increasingly come to realize that those local adaptations may be mismatched to the future climate. Still, they said, forest managers can be averse to assisted migration because they’re often focused on reducing near-term risks. “The safest thing for getting the trees established today isn’t necessarily the best thing for the longer term,” Aitken said.

Assisted migration essentially goes against decades of conservation wisdom — and it constitutes a level of intervention that makes some uneasy. Aitken also noted that it’s not going to be the right approach in every circumstance. “If you’ve got an established, intact forest ecosystem that isn’t suffering from some massive hit of climate or pest, disease, et cetera, I don’t think you want to intervene at this point,” she said. She also advises caution when it comes to moving species outside of their established range — for instance, planting redwoods in Washington. “It’s fundamentally going to change that ecosystem.”

But, ultimately, ecosystems are changing — and, as Grist has covered previously, some believe that approaches like assisted migration may be the best way to recognize and direct the profound changes humans are already having on the landscape. As forest managers plan and implement conservation projects, Aitken said, “We need to balance the risks of movements against the risks of doing nothing, and the right decisions are going to be different in different situations.”

— Syris Valentine

More exposure

• Read: more about Stossel Creek and other similar experimental restoration sites (Investigate West)
• Read: more about assisted migration efforts, especially for city trees (Grist)
• Read: a piece exploring the need to rethink our concept of “invasive species,” and how we humans alter ecosystems (Vox)
• Read: why more diverse forests are more resilient to extreme weather events (The Guardian)

A parting shot

Assisted migration is also being considered as a potential strategy to help animals whose homes are threatened by climate change — like the key deer, a subspecies of white-tailed deer that lives only on the islands of the Florida Keys. Just about 1,000 remain in the wild, and some are advocating relocating the species as sea level rise threatens its home. Here, a doe (smaller than her mainland cousins; about the size of a golden retriever) crosses Key Deer Boulevard on Big Pine Key.

IMAGE CREDITS

Vision: Grist

Spotlight: Syris Valentine / Grist

Parting shot: Jeffrey Greenberg / Universal Images Group via Getty Images

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline To prepare for the climate of tomorrow, foresters are branching out on Oct 16, 2024.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Syris Valentine.

Just days before, the peaks of roofs and the tops of trees were some of the only things visible above the murky brown water that had covered his hometown. Located in the Taquari Valley, Lajeado, population 85,000, was one of the communities hit hardest by the historic flooding that tore through Brazil’s southernmost state, Rio Grande do Sul, between late April and mid-May, displacing more than 650,000 people, killing 173, and injuring 806.

When Wendt arrived, 38 people were still missing. Backhoes were scooping mud from blocked roads, city workers were clearing sidewalks with pressure washers, and volunteers were sorting through donations of clothing, food, personal hygiene products, and bottled water.

Wendt — who now lives in the state capital of Porto Alegre and is studying for his master’s degree in information science while working in communications at the University of Taquari Valley (Univates) — had come home to check in on family and friends. But he also wanted to do something to help while there.

Last September, he had heard about a Univates mapping project led by researcher Sofia Royer Moraes, an environmental engineer who studies extreme flooding events in the Taquari-Antas River Basin. At the time, the Taquari River, which runs through Lajeado, had overflowed, leaving the region to deal with the worst flooding in 82 years, the displacement of at least 359,000 people, and the deaths of 48. Residents of the Taquari Valley were used to dealing with annual flooding, but this event was different. Studies showed that climate change had worsened the flood, which meant that future floods would bring even more deaths.

It was then that Moraes decided she could do something to help. She created what is known as a Citizen Map, using Google Maps as a platform for ordinary people using their smartphones to pinpoint the floodwaters’ reach. These so-called citizen scientists were instructed to take photos of what they saw and send them, along with their geolocation, to a WhatsApp group monitored by Moraes and her team. Combining that information with historic flood data from the area, the team could model what might happen during future floods, helping residents who had already lost everything to decide where it would be safest to rebuild their lives. The models could also give authorities the information they needed for better urban planning and allocation of resources.

Fascinated by the potential of the project, Wendt knew he wanted to pitch in. By now, Univates was partnering with the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, and this time, the goal was to map the entire state of Rio Grande do Sul.

As he drove around his hometown, Wendt snapped photos of everything he thought would benefit the Citizen Map: a white cross smeared with mud where a church once stood; a lone house standing among pieces of hundreds of others that had washed away; markings on a wall in the city center that registered the water’s height.

Wendt’s more than 20 data points collected at the end of May are now among the more than 600 on the constantly updated Citizen Map, a contribution he knew would help others but that he was surprised to see helped him as well.

“It helped me understand all of these connections,” he said. “If it’s raining in one place, what is the impact that’s going to have downriver? Someone who participates in this type of citizen science initiative ends up being more aware, more secure, and more empowered to deal with this type of situation, which, unfortunately, we know we can expect more of in the near future.”

In the context of climate change, the team behind the Citizen Map wants Brazilian authorities to use this data to rethink everything from urban planning and post-disaster recovery to the availability of health care and clean drinking water in the aftermath of climate-change-induced catastrophes. They also hope that by educating people about what’s going on around them, they’ll not only become more interested and invested in participating in solutions to local flooding, but also feel prepared to face what’s to come.

Experts have attributed the severity of the recent flooding in southern Brazil to human-driven climate change. An analysis carried out by researchers at the Pierre Simon Laplace Institute’s Climate and Environmental Sciences Laboratory showed that extreme weather events in Rio Grande do Sul that occurred between 2001 and 2023 delivered up to 15 percent more precipitation than events that occurred between 1979 and 2001.

A recent study also found that “the highly densely populated regions [in] Southern and Southeastern Brazil as well as the coastal section of Northeast Brazil are the most exposed to landslides and floods,” and that these impacts will continue to worsen with more warming. and increased the intensity of the rainfall between 6 and 9 percent.

The first record-setting flood to wash out the Taquari Valley and other parts of Rio Grande do Sul took place in 1941. That event, which also occurred in April and May, left the region’s population, living mostly in rural areas at the time, without food, water and shelter. The only record of the floodwaters’ height was a mark scratched into the wall of a school.

“That memory is isolated there,” says Wendt of the marker. “It doesn’t contribute as much as it could if it had happened nowadays, with the technology we have.”

The first Citizen Map that Moraes created last September collected data only on the perimeter of the affected area to determine what parts of the Taquari Valley would be considered at high risk of future flooding. Around 600 data points were sent in by 150 citizen scientists.

Some neighborhoods that participated heavily in mapping the September floods haven’t been involved in creating the new map, but that’s likely because those areas are still difficult to access, or not accessible at all. And while the state continues to recover from the emergency — it initially focused on saving people and animals from fast-moving waters and collapsing buildings and is now setting people up in shelters and other more permanent housing — data collection is expected to be slow.

“Data will likely start to come in quicker in another two or three weeks,” says Moraes. “The actual modeling of the Citizen Map should happen in July and August, and it will be available for consultation then too.”

In addition to using perimeter data, which shows the horizontal spread of water, the new map will also use data related to the height of floodwaters, often measured by water and mud stains left on the walls of people’s homes and local businesses.

The Citizen Map is currently very simple and powered by Google, but the team plans to partner with the the open-mapping nonprofit Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team to improve the visuals of their final product. “Google Maps has good visuals, but they’re fairly standard,” says Wendt. “We want our map to be as easy to understand as possible to make sure it can be used by anyone who wants to consult it to keep themselves safe and make the best decisions possible for their future.”

On May 2, when the second of this year’s three rain and flood episodes began in Rio Grande do Sul (the other two were on April 29 and May 13), Moraes and her team had to move out of the university building where they worked. The water had, again, started to rise, and this time it made its way inside.

They ended up setting up shop at A Hora, a local radio station that gave them space to work and talked about their project on the air, providing its WhatsApp number for anyone who wanted to send data or ask questions.

Soon, messages started to pour in. Some 200 people sent their locations to the Citizen Map team on May 2, and the team spent all afternoon and night analyzing data to determine who was in or near an area of risk and who ought to evacuate. For people living downstream, information on what was happening farther upstream was crucial in making such decisions.

“It’s so important for people to understand their surroundings, to know if they’re in an area of risk,” says Moraes. “And they want to understand. They want to be engaged.”

While anyone with a smartphone can collect data for the newest edition of the Citizen Map, most participants so far are professors and their students from universities around the region. The hope is that more people will join in once the situation on the ground starts to improve.

“I really support citizen science initiatives because they are exactly what people need to learn and feel empowered,” says Marta Angela Marcondes, an expert in water resources and coordinator of the Water Pollutant Index Project at the Municipal University of São Caetano do Sul. “I really believe in processes of prevention and not remediation, and civil society is a key component in making this happen.”

The culture of prevention is important to Moraes, too. She wants the Citizen Map not only to help residents of Rio Grande do Sul keep themselves safe and informed, but also for it to guide authorities to do the same. By using the map to define areas of risk, she says, decision makers can improve urban planning, creating better mitigation plans for future flooding — like improving stormwater drainage and management systems — and allowing new homes, schools, and health care facilities, among others, to be built in safer areas.

Moraes wants the Citizen Map to keep growing, eventually mapping the lack of drinking water and access to basic health care, as well as instances of disease, in the aftermath of climate-related crises.

“With that information, I can see the big picture by municipality, region, or state,” she says. “As a decision maker, I can then use this information to determine which areas are more fragile and direct the necessary public policies to those that need them most.”

Two to five years after the original event, Moraes hopes she will be able to map where those public policies have ended up and measure their success. “In this new context of climate change, people need to be prepared,” she says. “We can’t stop these events from happening, but we can make sure we’re ready to deal with them in the best way possible.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline How a ‘citizen map’ is helping Brazil prepare for its next big flood on Jun 23, 2024.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Jill Langlois.

• Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu orders the country’s military to prepare a plan to evacuate civilians from the densely populated southern Gaza city of Rafah ahead of an expected Israeli invasion.
• Pakistan’s former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif says he will seek to form a coalition government after his party trailed independent candidates backed by his imprisoned rival, Imran Khan, in parliamentary election results.
• Former Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan says he’s running for U.S. Senate.
• A special counsel report says there’s evidence President Joe Biden “willfully” retained and shared highly classified materials when he was a private citizen, including documents about military and foreign policy in Afghanistan. It also calls into question Biden’s memory and mental fitness. The Justice Department report nonetheless says no criminal charges are warranted for Biden or anyone else.
• California Department of Water Resources released the final environmental impact report for the controversial Bay Delta Tunnel. It takes the state one step closer to building a conveyance that would funnel fresh water flows from the Sacramento River under the Delta at the rate of 6000 cubic feet per second.
• San Francisco Mayor London Breed is pushing a March 5 ballot measure that would require single adults on welfare be screened and treated for illegal drug addiction or else lose cash assistance.

Palestinian children displaced by Israeli air and ground offensive on the Gaza Strip walk through a temporary tent camp near Kerem Shalom crossing in Rafah, Sunday, Jan. 14, 2024. (AP Photo/Hatem Ali)

The post Israeli military to prepare a plan to evacuate civilians from Gaza city of Rafah ahead of an expected Israeli invasion – February 9, 2024 appeared first on KPFA.

This content originally appeared on KPFA - The Pacifica Evening News, Weekdays and was authored by KPFA.

Russian lawmaker Andrei Kartapolov told deputies in Moscow on January 25 that Ukrainian military intelligence had been given a 15-minute warning before the Ilyushin Il-76 military transport plane entered the Belgorod region in Russia, near the border with Ukraine, and that Russia had received confirmation the message was received.

Kartapolov did not provide any evidence to back up his claim and Ukrainian military intelligence spokesman Andriy Yusov reiterated in comments to RFE/RL's Ukrainian Service that it had not received either a written or verbal request to secure the airspace where the plane went down.

Yusov said Ukraine had been using reconnaissance drones in the area and that Russia had launched attack drones. There was "no confirmed information" that Ukraine had hit any targets, he said.

"Unfortunately, we can assume various scenarios, including provocation, as well as the use of Ukrainian prisoners as a human shield for transporting ammunition and weapons for S-300 systems," he told RFE/RL.

Live Briefing: Russia's Invasion Of Ukraine

RFE/RL's Live Briefing gives you all of the latest developments on Russia's full-scale invasion, Kyiv's counteroffensive, Western military aid, global reaction, and the plight of civilians. For all of RFE/RL's coverage of the war in Ukraine, click here.

There has been no direct confirmation from Kyiv on Russian claims that the plane had Ukrainian POWs on board or that the aircraft was downed by a Ukrainian antiaircraft missile.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy has called for an international investigation of the incident, and Yusov reiterated that call, as "there are many circumstances that require investigation and maximum study."

The RIA Novosti news agency on January 25 reported that both black boxes had been recovered from the wreckage site in Russia's Belgorod region near the border with Ukraine.

The Investigative Committee said it had opened a criminal case into what it said was a "terrorist attack." The press service of the Investigative Committee said in a news release that preliminary data of the inspection of the scene of the incident, "allow us to conclude that the aircraft was attacked by an antiaircraft missile from the territory of Ukraine."

The Investigative Committee said that "fragmented human remains" were found at the crash site, repeating that six crew members, military police officers, and Ukrainian POWs were on board the plane.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov on January 25 called the downing of the Ilyushin Il-76 military transport plane a "monstrous act," though Moscow has yet to show any evidence that it was downed by a Ukrainian missile, or that there were Ukrainian prisoners on board.

While not saying who shot down the plane, Zelenskiy said that "all clear facts must be established...our state will insist on an international investigation."

Ukrainian officials have said that a prisoner exchange was to have taken place on January 24 and that Russia had not informed Ukraine that Ukrainian POWs would be flown on cargo planes.

Ukrainian military intelligence said it did not have "reliable and comprehensive information" on who was on board the flight but said the Russian POWs it was responsible for "were delivered in time to the conditional exchange point where they were safe."

Dmytro Lubinets, Ukraine's commissioner for human rights, said in a post on X, formerly Twitter, that "currently, there are no signs of the fact that there were so many people on the Il-76 plane, be they citizens of Ukraine or not."

Aviation experts told RFE/RL that it was possible a Ukrainian antiaircraft missile downed the plane but added that a Russian antiaircraft could have been responsible.

"During the investigation, you can easily determine which system shot down the plane based on the missiles' damaging elements," said Roman Svitan, a Ukrainian reserve colonel and an aviation-instructor pilot.

When asked about Russian claims of dozens of POWs on board, Svitan said that from the footage released so far, he'd seen no evidence to back up the statements.

"From the footage that was there, I looked through it all, it’s not clear where there are dozens of bodies.... There's not a single body visible at all. At one time I was a military investigator, including investigating disasters; believe me, if there were seven or eight dozen people there, the field would be strewn with corpses and remains of bodies," Svitan added.

Russian officials said the plane was carrying 65 Ukrainian prisoners of war, six crew members, and three escorts.

A list of the six crew members who were supposed to be on the flight was obtained by RFE/RL. The deaths of three of the crew members were confirmed to RFE/RL by their relatives.

Video on social media showed a plane spiraling to the ground, followed by a loud bang and explosion that sent a ball of smoke and flames skyward.

This content originally appeared on News - Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty and was authored by News - Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty.

Is the West ready for the collapse of Russia? Will the country return to the chaos and car bombs of the 1990s? Will the statues of Stalin come down or be joined by ones to Putin? If the Kremlin is ripped apart by a succession battle, what will happen to the nukes? Olga Lautman, the Russian mafia expert and co-host of the Kremlin Files podcast, joins Gaslit Nation to forecast the collapse of Russia and why the West must get ready, especially for the sake of ensuring Ukraine prevails–for all of us.

This week’s bonus show, exclusive to our supporters at the Truth-teller level and higher, answers questions from our listeners at the Democracy Defender level and higher. To our Patreon community, we look forward to seeing you at our Gaslit Nation Social Media workshop on January 18th at 8 pm EST, made especially for those who hate social media. Rachel Brody, a tenacious organizer who helps various campaigns with their social media strategy, will help lead the discussion and answer your questions.

To get access to our January 18th social media workshop, subscribe at the Truth-teller level or higher on Patreon.com/Gaslit 

Thank you to everyone who supports the show – we could not make Gaslit Nation without you!

SHOW NOTES:

• Razom Call to Action – save Ukraine https://www.instagram.com/p/C12YBemup2G/

• With Shutdown Looming, House and Senate Leaders Agree on Spending Levels Despite the deal, time is short to assemble and pass legislation putting the agreement in force before a Jan. 19 deadline. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/07/us/congress-spending-deal-shutdown.html?campaign_id=60&emc=edit_na_20240107&instance_id=0&nl=breaking-news&ref=cta®i_id=48614702&segment_id=154521&user_id=097a378032011d6e8be1570cdce0a176

• Putin’s ally Netanyahu helping him his war in Ukraine: https://twitter.com/CrisLeeMaza/status/1743296552561480140

• Putin Quietly Signals He Is Open to a Cease-Fire in Ukraine Despite its bravado in public, the Kremlin has indicated its interest in striking a deal to halt the war — so long as it could still declare victory. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/23/world/europe/putin-russia-ukraine-war-cease-fire.html

• Russia must be held accountable over Ukraine – we should seize its assets Joseph Stiglitz and Andrew Kosenko https://www.theguardian.com/business/2024/jan/08/russia-ukraine-seize-assets-us-eu

• Putin’s $300bn Belongs to Ukraine https://cepa.org/article/putins-300bn-belongs-to-ukraine/

• Pentagon didn’t inform Biden, White House for days about Austin’s hospitalization https://www.politico.com/news/2024/01/06/pentagon-took-3-days-to-inform-white-houses-nsc-of-austins-hospitalization-00134176

• "It's time to act": Biden calls for over US$60 billion in aid to Ukraine https://www.pravda.com.ua/eng/news/2024/01/8/7436292/

• US Intelligence Shows Flawed China Missiles Led Xi to Purge Army China missiles filled with water, not fuel: US intelligence Xi seeking to root out corruption, prepare military for combat https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-01-06/us-intelligence-shows-flawed-china-missiles-led-xi-jinping-to-purge-military?utm_source=website&utm_medium=share&utm_campaign=twitter

• Military briefing: Russia has the upper hand in electronic warfare with Ukraine Both Kyiv and Moscow seek to bolster drone jamming capabilities as attacks mount  https://www.ft.com/content/a477d3f1-8c7e-4520-83b0-572ad674c28e

• Top 10 Trends for 2024 https://www.ft.com/content/9edcf793-aaf7-42e2-97d0-dd58e9fab8ea

• Extraordinary thread by Ruth Deyermond, Senior Lecturer, Dept of War Studies, King's College London. Russian and US foreign & security policy https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1741506057719951483.html

This content originally appeared on Gaslit Nation and was authored by Andrea Chalupa.

Halsey mill, in Oregon’s Willamette Valley. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.

Elite Stretching Exercises to Warm Up the Conference of Polluters 28

Summary

In the months prior to the 2023 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change conference (hosted in Dubai), summits held by global, ‘multipolar’ and continental-African elites are worthy of consideration in part because their roles are the basis for pessimism about low-income African communities’ ability to withstand further extreme weather events. In the Brazil-Russia-India-China-South Africa bloc, with its new (high-fossil) BRICS+ members from the Middle East, as well as in African Union, G20 and United Nations summiting in recent months, self-interest and internecine competition prevailed. Yet whether in Europe’s new carbon import tariffs or the push for African emissions trading, contradictions are emerging between imperial and sub-imperial climate powers. Still, two overarching elite objectives remain: first, to limit emissions cuts even if that threatens many species’ survival; and second, to avoid liability for ‘Loss & Damage,’ adaptation and other compensation expenses. A reassertion of climate justice and an expansion of African activism are in order, with some oppositional seeds beginning to bear fruit in even the most brazen sub-imperial climate power, South Africa.

Introduction

Many African cities have recently taken a pounding due to rain storms amplified by the climate crisis, including devastating floods leaving thousands dead. In the Mediterranean coastal town of Derna, Libya in September 2023, more than 13,000 residents died after two poorly-maintained dams collapsed when ‘Medicane’ (Mediterranean hurricane) Daniel dropped 400 mm of rain in 24 hours. (Usually September’s rainfall there is 1.5 mm.) In Blantyre, Malawi in February-March 2023, Cyclone Freddy arrived – from Australia – and killed 158 in mudslides. In Kinshasa, in December 2022, an estimated 200 died in flooding. In Lokoja and many Nigerian cities from June-October 2022, there were at least 600 fatalities. In Durban, South Africa in April 2022, a ‘Rain Bomb’ killed more than 500 after 351 mm fell in 24 hours. And in 2019’s Cyclone Idai, 90 percent of Beira, Mozambique was under water, with more than 2000 fatalities in Mozambique, Malawi and Zimbabwe. Likewise, droughts hit African cities particularly hard because water-demand management was generally not in place, as witnessed by Cape Town nearly suffering ‘Day Zero’ in 2018, a crisis repeated several times since in South Africa’s Eastern Cape province, including the main city of Gqeberha (Port Elizabeth). The Western Cape’s late-September flooding included 300 mm in one day in Franshoek (near Cape Town), a record – with at least 11 dead (mainly because rising water led to the electrocution of eight people who had informal, unsafe connections as a result of the state’s failure to implement its Free Basic Electricity policy). In Somalia in November, 29 died in the towns of Baidoa, Bardere, Luuq, and Galkacyo due to record rainfall and flooding.

Dating to the early 1980s, many an ‘IMF Riot’ in Africa has followed food shortages or price hikes associated with austerity conditions (Walton and Seddon 1994). In 2022, soaring energy prices and unrepayable interest on foreign debt in a context of fast-declining African currency values raised tensions and protest levels in urban and rural areas alike (Bond 2023). African peasant livelihoods are even more difficult to repair in the wake of extreme climate incidents, especially drying soil, desertification, flooding, wild fires, deforestation and sea level rise. The Horn of Africa and South Africa recently demonstrated that when long-lasting droughts break, the rain can unleash unprecedented locust plagues. These are formidable problems for Africa’s majority in rural areas. The capacity to make demands for reparations is ever more important, not only in relation to climate crisis but also as a result of the increase in multinational-corporate extractive industries – including fossil fuel and mineral commodities whose prices rose dramatically in 2020-22 – taking over Africa’s increasingly-scarce arable land.

If we pose the question, the way Jun Borras et al (2022) did for Journal of Peasant Studies readers in 2022, the global scale appears ominous, given the adverse balance of forces: “What combinations of narratives and strategies frame climate change and the institutionalized responses to it in agrarian settings? What exclusions and inclusions result from this?”

Agrarian settings are very diverse, but by considering monolithic elite summitry, the problems faced in agrarian societies become clearer, as do activists’ countervailing approaches. The near-total exclusion of African people’s and environmental interests from global and ‘multipolar’ climate policy appears certain at COP28 and in the following months, given what we can learn from jockeying at mid-2023 international leadership summits. Prospects remain low for new global (as well as national and municipal) policies, programs and funding that can genuinely address the climate crisis. This was clearly witnessed through the ways that preliminary meetings established narratives for the 28^th United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) Conference of the Parties – ‘COP28’ – to be held in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) in December 2023.

Climate Justice (CJ) narratives include interrelated components that are typically demanded of global and continental elites by Africa’s most critical civil society advocates: slowing and reversing Greenhouse Gas Emissions (GHGs) with genuine ‘decarbonization’ and appropriate carbon-sequestration approaches; promoting agro-ecological strategies for food production and soil restoration; assuring that adequate “Loss & Damage” payments go to victims to rebuild after extreme weather events; climate-proofing the built and social infrastructure (known as adaptation and resilience); and compensating Africans for not undergoing the high-carbon development trajectory the West and BRICS+ economies (Mwenda and Bond 2020). Each of these areas is discussed in the Conclusion, along with cases of CJ leadership (especially from South Africa). But can many more CJ activists in African civil (and uncivil) society influence their national and local leaders along these lines, and mobilize international-solidarity support, especially when it comes to participation in an increasingly fossil-biased United Nations process?

In deploying such critical narratives, debilitating strategic divisions typically emerge between climate advocates: insiders versus outsiders; CJ radicals versus ‘Climate Action’ moderates; and Global South versus Global North activists. Very rarely is a clear division of labor established, that can assist in identifying optimal roles for uncivil-society ‘tree-shakers’ whose work assists the civilized-society ‘jam-makers’ integrated into UNFCCC summitting (Bond 2018). And given the balance of power in relation to all these CJ demands (with the exception of the UN’s tepid, assimilation-oriented lip service to identity politics), there is very little prospect for progress at coming global climate summits. Following Dubai in 2023, the COP29 will be hosted by an Eastern European city (to be determined) in 2024. Perhaps only in late 2025 when the UNFCCC moves to the Amazon (Belém, Brazil), will change be possible.

What, then, are the current power relations, and how do African climate narratives adjust, in view of several major elite summits in August-September 2023, and the increasingly pro-fossil standpoint of the major historic African emitter, South Africa?

COP28’s adverse balance of forces, thanks to South African and Kenyan sub-imperialism

Signs of elite-Africa’s weaknesses within the UNFCCC are legion, especially in mid-2023 when two men were seen as the continent’s main leaders: South African President Cyril Ramaphosa and Kenyan President William Ruto. The former was a coal-mining tycoon (through Shanduka, which he owned until 2014 when he became deputy president), and has ambitions of a recarbonization of the South African economy through what in 2019 he termed the ‘game-changing’ offshore oil and gas deposits identified especially by TotalEnergies and Shell (although much exploration has been foiled by CJ activists in recent years) (Ramaphosa 2019). The latter, a self-described ‘hustler’ leader, witnessed his “profile rise with climate summit hustle,” as Africa Energy reported: “All of Kenyan President William Ruto’s personal energy, facility with words, public charm and ruthless cultivation of influential allies was on show” when he hosted the Africa Climate Summit (Marks 2023). Ruto’s opening speech set the tone: “We must see in green growth not just a climate imperative but also a fountain of multibillion-dollar opportunities that the world is poised to capitalize” (Ngam 2023).

But Ruto’s ‘influential allies’ – especially New York-based consultancy McKinsey, whose devastating role in Kenya Airways and South Africa’s Eskom led to international condemnations, as well as European Union Commission President Ursula van der Leyen, who is responsible for the world’s largest carbon trading scheme – also appeared to influence him. Critics across African civil society, organized as the “Real African Climate Summit” (2023), despaired over the hustling of Ruto:

“The so-called ‘think tanks committee’ set up to drive negotiations at the Summit is chaired by individuals who represent UK and US-based organizations and not African organizations. The content for the Summit – including major initiatives – is being led by McKinsey, with the World Resources Institute now competing to shape the agenda and its outcomes. Both are headquartered in the United States and do not champion Africa’s interests.  Some African organizations that advance Western agenda have also been given a disproportionately huge role in the organization of the event. The result is a Summit agenda that foregrounds the position and interests of the West, namely, carbon markets, carbon sequestration and ‘climate positive’ approaches… These concepts and false solutions are led by Western interests while being marketed as African priorities. In truth, though, these approaches will embolden wealthy nations and large corporations to continue polluting the world, much to Africa’s detriment.”

As a reflection of that concern, the second sentence in Van der Leyen’s keynote speech praised Ruto: “I very much welcome Kenya’s ‘Climate Change Act 2023’ that was launched during this Summit and that puts strong emphasis on carbon markets.” The civil society critique made the opposite point:

“Avoid all false solutions such as carbon markets and geo-engineering which are designed to encourage wealthy countries and people to continue polluting and turning Africa into a dumping ground and field for technological trials. Implement and adopt climate policies that promote a just and equitable phase-out of all new oil, gas and coal projects on the African continent in line with Africa’s development interests and the recommendations of Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, International Energy Agency and other scientific organizations by cutting public and private financing” (Real African Climate Summit 2023).

And their accusation of outside manipulation was more poignant because only fewer than half Africa’s 54 leaders attended the Summit (e.g., Ramaphosa choosing instead to go to Emmerson Mnangagwa’s disputed Zimbabwe election celebration and inauguration). The AU itself suffers relatively weak leaders: as chair, Comoros Islands President Azali Assoumani (who came to power in a 1999 coup) and Commission Chairperson Moussa Faki. The AU’s own judicial Tribunal had, three days earlier, condemned Faki for “brazenness” and “audacity,” and for having “become a law unto himself,” resulting in “lawlessness” and “reputational damage.” Six African countries were, at the time, suspended from the AU due to military takeovers: Gabon, Niger, Sudan, Mali, Guinea and Burkina Faso.

The problem of local elites undermining the continent’s interests is an old one, reminiscent of Walter Rodney’s (1972, 41-42) warning (in How Europe Underdeveloped Africa): “the operation of the imperialist system bears major responsibility for African economic retardation by draining African wealth and by making it impossible to develop more rapidly the resources of the continent. Secondly, one has to deal with those who manipulate the system and those who are either agents or unwitting accomplices of the said system.”

Climate politics is an increasingly important example, dating at least to the 2009 Copenhagen COP15, where leadership of the Pan African Climate Justice Alliance (PACJA) accused the lead African negotiator, Ethiopian President Meles Zenawi, of conspiring with the conservative French President Nicolas Sarkozy to “sell out the lives and hopes of Africans for a pittance” (Mwenda and Bond 2020). At that summit, G77-bloc negotiator Lumumba Di-Aping (then a Sudanese diplomat, subsequently exiled) explained to a PACJA meeting how some African delegations were “either lazy or had been ‘bought off’ by the industrialized nations. He singled out South Africa, saying that some members of that delegation had actively sought to disrupt the unity of the bloc” (Welz 2009).

That role continues, insofar as by far the highest GHG emitter in Africa, South Africa, has in recent months abused the diplomatic power of Environment Minister Barbara Creecy. She is a unique politician, e.g, as the only white ruling-party member elected to the African National Congress National (ANC) Executive Committee in 2021. She is able to co-exist with a strongly pro-fossil ANC leadership – not just Ramaphosa but openly pro-coal Energy Minister and ruling-party chairperson Gwede Mantashe (who in October 2023 accused climate activists of being CIA agents) – because of her deregulatory approach. To illustrate, Creecy’s bias reflects not only the permissions she regularly grants for offshore methane gas and onshore fracking, but also that the South African government and energy parastatal Eskom seek to introduce two gas-fired plants (4000MW strong) in the next few years by using 44 percent of the ‘Just Energy Transition Partnership’ (JETP) funding they raise, and by keeping coal-fired power plants open much longer (even in violation of JETP financial deals) (Bond 2024).

Indeed, Creecy spent August-October 2023 approving several high-pollution, high-emissions projects proposed by multinational corporations. Her support for TotalEnergies’ plan to drill for oil and gas offshore Cape Town required her to reject a 2022 court judgment against a similar Shell Oil proposal for the Eastern Cape’s Wild Coast. She supported oceanic seismic blasting near the Namibian border by an Australian firm (Searcher) that seeks what geologists predict could be billions of barrels of oil and trillions of cubic feet of gas deposits. Creecy’s excuse in these cases is that the Makhanda High Court’s September 2022 finding against offshore gas exploration – made by three judges, in part based on the refusal to take climate considerations seriously – was still (a year later) under appeal at the Supreme Court. Both Shell and its local ally, the former leftwing trade unionist and subsequent entrepreneur Johnny Copelyn, have been generous contributors to the South African ruling party, but courts such as Makhanda’s remain relatively independent of party-based favoritism (in contrast, say to Zimbabwe or the United States of America).

At the same time, Creecy approved a pollution waiver for the continent’s largest coal-fired power station (Kusile), so that the Eskom plant – generating 4800MW if operating at full steam – can emit lethal sulfur dioxide and nitrous oxide without Flue Gas Desulfurization, permission which scientists predict will kill several hundred nearby residents. Also in 2023, she was sued by community-based environmentalists (the Vaal Environmental Justice Alliance) for allowing the Indian steel giant ArcelorMittal’s foundries to emit toxic hydrogen sulfide gases above legal limits. Finally, her promotion of a controversial biodiversity offset to be managed by a poorly-resourced provincial parks agency assisted a notorious Turkish floating fossil-fuel energy generator, Karpowership, whose Liquefied Natural Gas-powered ships she gave permission to operate from three sensitive harbors in spite of sustained environmentalist opposition on grounds of the ships’ threat to local air quality, to marine life and to South Africa’s GHG emissions budget.

This approach extends to destructive continental activities, and indeed South African sub-imperial climate and broader environmental damage is not new. As Sam Moyo and Paris Yeros (2011, 19) explained in 2011, a conflict of interest against the African continent is a feature of the BRICS’ relationship to imperialism: “The degree of participation in the Western military project is also different from one case to the next, although, one might say, there is a ‘schizophrenia’ to all this, typical of ‘sub-imperialism’.” To illustrate, more than 1200 SA National Defense Force troops have intervened in Mozambique since 2021 – at the direct behest of French President Emmanuel Macron and to the applause of the U.S. African Command, on behalf of TotalEnergies’ $20 billion Liquefied Natural Gas facility (against a local Islamic insurgency) (Bond 2022).

This follows the Pretoria army’s deployment since 2013 in a disastrous UN ‘peacekeeping’ force in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo, in the vicinity of not only minerals exploited by South African firms, but also increasingly, fossil fuels (such as a Lake Albert $10 billion oil concession that in 2010 was granted to Khulubusa Zuma, nephew of the then South African president Jacob). A similar Central African Republic deployment followed South African extractive-industry capital but was curtailed when in 2013, militants overthrew a small SANDF force in Bangui. For Samir Amin (writing in his post-humous autobiography), such incidents reveal how the shift from apartheid sub-imperialism to post-apartheid neoliberalism meant “nothing has changed. South Africa’s sub-imperialist role has been reinforced, still dominated as it is by the Anglo-American mining monopolies” (Amin 2019).

In early 2023, Creecy was chosen to manage crucial UNFCCC functions by Sultan Al Jaber, the presiding officer from the host UAE, who tellingly also serves as chief executive of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (a firm whose offices intervened in conference management in mid-2023 notwithstanding the obvious conflict of interest). Creecy will serve as co-leader (alongside the Danish environment minister) of the Global Stock Take (GST) – i.e., measuring how seriously national states have cut their economy’s emissions – having in 2022 co-chaired a COP27 committee assessing mitigation. Her aide Richard Sherman co-manages Loss & Damage Fund planning, a process that in October 2023 nearly broke down, he confessed: “It’s late, we’re tired, we’re frustrated. We have, to a large extent, failed you” (Sengupta and Goswami 2023).

No African delegation has ever had such climate-policy influence, at least since South Africa hosted the COP17 in Durban in 2011 followed by Morocco in 2016, on both occasions serving emitters’ interests (as discussed below). The 2023 GST exercise is anticipated to not only avoid crucial “phase out fossil fuels” language, but also greenwash the world’s combustion and leakage of methane, notwithstanding its 85-times greater potency as a greenhouse gas than CO2 over a 20-year period. South Africa’s gas pipelines became notorious for eruptions in 2023, even in central Johannesburg – as massive methane gas development and pipeline projects were being put in place across the Indian and Atlantic coastlines and through on-shore fracking proposals.

Even if Creecy had wanted to address climate seriously, the global terrain is unfavorable. To illustrate, four August-September summits in quick succession set the stage for a disastrous COP28, allowing both the UAE and South Africa to play what can be considered a loyal ‘sub-imperial’ role in alliance with the West and BRICS. First, the August meeting of the Brazil-Russia-India-China-South Africa BRICS bloc in Johannesburg expanded the group to 11 members, including three – Saudi Arabia, UAE and Iran – with extensive emissions and oil or gas production, and two others, Egypt and Argentina, with enormous reserves now being tapped. Second, the inaugural African Climate Summit occurred in Nairobi in early September. Third, the next weekend, the G20 met in New Delhi. And fourth, in New York City, from September 18-22, the UN General Assembly gathered world leaders. These were important moments in defining the African continental elite’s narratives, strategies, and alliances when it comes to global climate policy – and all fall short of the bare minimum required to protect Africans from worsening climate crisis.

Setting the UNFCCC stage by limiting the scope for emissions cuts and ‘polluter pays’ liability

Three UNFCCC COP precursors require mentioning for context – the 2009 COP15 in Copenhagen, the 2011 COP17 in Durban, and the 2015 COP21 in Paris – and power relations were also revealed in remarks by the leading U.S. climate official, John Kerry, in July 2023.

The Copenhagen Accord represented the end of global climate accountability, what with a secret meeting of five countries trumping the rest of the world, agreeing that a ‘bottom up’ voluntary system would replace the Kyoto Protocol’s binding provisions. As Bill McKibben (2009) complained of Barack Obama:

“He blew up the United Nations. The idea that there’s a world community that means something has disappeared tonight… when you get too close to the center of things that count – the fossil fuel that’s at the center of our economy – you can forget about it. We’re not interested. You’re a bother, and when you sink beneath the waves, we don’t want to hear much about it. The dearest hope of the American right for 50 years was essentially realized because in the end coal is at the center of America’s economy. We already did this with war and peace, and now we’ve done it with global warming. What exactly is the point of the U.N. now? He formed a league of super-polluters, and would-be super-polluters.”

Their damage would be long-lasting, yet the super-polluter leaders of ‘BASIC’ – Brazil’s Ignacio Lula da Silva, South Africa’s Jacob Zuma, India’s Manmohan Singh and China’s Wen Jiabao – who were joined by Obama at that UNFCCC meeting subsequently left office, although Lula returned in 2023, in time to learn that the Amazon forest had inexorably shifted from carbon sink to net emitter. Meanwhile, Zuma appeared again on the climate scene in mid-2023 (just days before being pardoned for contempt of court in his ongoing KwaZulu-Natal corruption case): in Zimbabwe, he marketed ‘two million’ carbon offset credits from Russian Siberia – which were ridiculed as worthless and ultimately rejected by the Victoria Falls conference organizers (Lang 2023). Such obvious scamming aside, Zuma’s 2009 behavior at Copenhagen was consistent with the needs of the major polluting countries. So in 2011 during COP17 hosting duties, his leadership was celebrated by US State Department negotiator Todd Stern (2011), who told U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton of the “significant success for the United States” in Durban, particularly the major historic polluter’s objectives in limiting liability, or what in the UNFCCC is termed Combined But Differentiated Responsibility.

The unwillingness of the U.S. to pay reparations, joined by BASIC and other large emitters, was confirmed in Paris Climate Agreement of 2015. According to Saleemul Huq and Roger-Mark De Souza (2015) of the Woodrow Wilson Center, “A concession by developing countries on liability and compensation was reflected in the Agreement’s decision text, which notes that there is no possibility of claiming liability and compensation for Loss and Damage,” i.e. costs of extreme climate-change incidents. And on 13 July 2023, Clinton’s replacement as U.S. Secretary of State during the Paris negotiations, John Kerry, testified to the House of Representatives Foreign Relations Committee (2023) as the Biden Administration’s climate envoy. He was asked by conservative Florida Republican Brian Mast about climate reparations:

Mast: “Are you planning to commit America to climate reparations: that is to say, we have to pay some other country because they had a flood or they had a hurricane or a typhoon for awhile?”

Kerry: “No. Under no circumstances.”

Mast: “Very good, I’m glad to hear you say that I do have a no.”

Kerry: “Why don’t you create an exclamation point beside it.”

Mast: “I will write in an exclamation point for you and I’m glad that we have agreement on that I don’t know if my black pen will work. We’ll see. There we go, there’s your exclamation point!”

Kerry: “… There is the finalization of the fund that was created, the so-called loss and damage fund, which is simply a recognition. It does not have any liability in it. We specifically put phrases in that negate any possibility of liability.”

Those last five chilling words represent Washington’s outright rejection of ‘polluter pays,’ entailing a de facto default on climate debt, a rejection of legitimate liability obligations that are provided for in most national environmental management systems. Such a stance also serves Pretoria’s and the BRICS’ interests, for they too owe reparations.

BRICS+ climate sabotage in Johannesburg

The climate orientation of the BRICS and now BRICS+ (with six new members) is self-interested, as witnessed in sub-imperial/imperial unity with the United States, Europe and other large emitters in 2009, 2011 and 2015, as well as in preparations for the COP28. That self-interest reflects 11 countries which produce 58 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions and 43 percent of the world’s oil supply.

But no matter how much the BRICS – and specifically BASIC – leaders cohere with the imperialist powers in opposing adequate emissions cuts and reparations, there is also what Brazilian dependencia theorist Ruy Mauro Marini (1972) termed ‘antagonistic cooperation’: internecine conflicts following from domestic modes of capital accumulation that conflict with those of the global powers. To be sure, in practical (not rhetorical) respects, most of the BRICS are dominated by neoliberal financial, pro-trade ruling-class factions, consistent with destructive global capitalism, and in spite of sometimes extreme territorial conflict (in Russia/Ukraine, Israel/Palestine, Central Asia, the Himalaya Mountains and the South China Sea) and financial ‘de-dollarization’ debates, there is a great deal of multilateral policy overlap at the UNFCCC.

And yet the carbon-intensive character of antagonistic cooperation has set the stage for a revealing climate-related contradiction with the West in relation to inclement ‘climate sanctions’ in the form of Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanisms (CBAMs). Starting in the European Union in October 2023 (but with tariffs only being applied in 2026), and likely followed by other Western importers, the CBAM adds tariffs to imports with high levels of embedded GHGs, where the exporting economy does not have adequate carbon taxes (thus representing an implicit subsidy of carbon emissions). In August, the BRICS’ Johannesburg Declaration complained,

“We oppose trade barriers including those under the pretext of tackling climate change imposed by certain developed countries and reiterate our commitment to enhancing coordination on these issues. We underline that measures taken to tackle climate change and biodiversity loss must be WTO-consistent… We express our concern at any WTO inconsistent discriminatory measure that will distort international trade, risk new trade barriers and shift burden of addressing climate change and biodiversity loss to BRICS members and developing countries” (emphasis added) (BRICS 2023).

The phrasing here represents a version of climate denialism, because there are already extreme distortions in international trade, investment and finance due to the capitalist system’s failure to internalize corporate GHG emissions, pollution and resource depletion into price calculations. Given the threat climate catastrophes and ecocide pose to the world, especially to the BRICS+ countries, the desire to retain prevailing anti-ecological distortions is “the greatest market failure the world has seen,” according to British economist Nick Stern (2007). Indeed, repeatedly since 2021, the host South African ruling class – both state and corporate – reiterated that coming Western climate sanctions against energy-intensive exports are the main reason the economy must decarbonize. Because of the excessive coal-fired power embedded in the country’s exported products, a tariff will be imposed by countries that have adopted higher carbon prices – $100/tonne in the EU Emissions Trading Scheme, compared to Pretoria’s $0.35/tonne – so as to prevent ‘carbon leakage’.

Such tariffs could well be devastating to firms in South Africa’s so-called Energy Intensive Users Groups firms: 27 mainly Western multinational corporations which consume 42 percent of the country’s scarce electricity largely for processing non-renewable mineral resources. They logically resist decarbonization because there is less ‘baseload power’ and higher upfront capital costs associated with solar, wind and storage. The BRICS complain about tariffs that, “under the pretext of tackling climate change, [will be] imposed by certain developed countries.”

This grievance has, since 2010, been articulated by South Africans with a strong commitment to high-carbon development, none more vociferously than former Minister of Trade and Industry Rob Davies. Writing for the African Climate Foundation, Davies (2023) argued, “CBAM is a measure that, in my view, needs to be rejected, opposed and challenged in any way or forum possible. Developing a strategy for this is doubly urgent in view of its propensity to be replicated in several other jurisdictions.” The immediate stakes for South Africa, he suggested, were losses of $1.5 billion in annual steel, aluminium and iron exports to Europe, with chemicals, plastics and even automobiles to soon follow.

Davies (2023) did not consider the positive side of losing those exports, namely that South Africa would thereby suffer lower declines in its stock of non-renewable resources (i.e., the minerals that go into many of the processed metals) and therefore would benefit from retaining natural wealth for future generations. Nor did he factor in the electricity costs of the deep mining, smelting, metals processing, petrochemicals, internal-combustion-engine automobiles and other high-carbon exports. The merits of redirecting that power to labour-intensive industries, small businesses and households are obvious to any South African suffering sustained load-shedding. He ignored the Social Cost of Carbon from such energy-intensive industries, which if measured at $3000/tonne of CO2 emitted, and then applied to the 500 megatonnes of annual national emissions, is nearly four times in excess of South Africa’s anticipated 2023 GDP of $400 billion.

Davies’ own bias towards these high-carbon emissions could be identified in his career as Minister of Trade and Industry from 2009-19, when he supported construction of a new coal-fired power plant, shale fracking gas development, diesel and petrol cars and trucks (and no electric vehicles) and other high-carbon industries (especially the corrupt Musina-Makhado Special Economic Zone), all driven by multinational corporations which externalized profits. Indeed in many cases, the profit repatriation process was facilitated by ‘Illicit Financial Flows,’ to the extent South Africa suffered a ‘grey listing’ by the Financial Action Task Force in February 2023 due to ever-looser Treasury and Reserve Bank controls, about which Davies never publicly complained.

Hence there are sometimes important differences between the material interests of imperial and sub-imperial economies, in terms of internecine competition. Mostly, the concrete material interests broadly coincide, insofar as BRICS ambitions are still to achieve a more substantive role in multilateral corporate rule, not to upend it (as so many committed to hype and hope like to pretend). Given that some insistent and even ‘anti-imperial’ South voices raise international economic injustices as a concern, the logical temptation of observers with progressive leanings is to support their rhetoric – even when unmatched by deeds. But climate sanctions against mega-emitters in the BRICS+ is not one of those times, even if the BRICS’ main climate negotiating bloc, BASIC, joined the battle against CBAM. As South African Environment Minister Barbara Creecy (2023) complained on 20 September 2023 to a BASIC ministerial meeting,

“the window of opportunity is fast closing to pressure the EU and others that are waiting in the wings to impose unilateral taxes in the name of climate action, to either abandon their plans or adjust them to make them legal, fair and about climate change. According to our trade department, Africa stands to lose approximately $26 billion each year in direct taxes to the EU in the initial phase of the CBAM alone. Very soon others, including the USA, UK and Canada will follow the EU’s example and the list of taxed commodities will grow. The net impact will be to more than cancel out any climate finance and other support we have received from the global North and to undermine our sustainable development.”

African elites disappoint their constituents in Nairobi

South African leaders like Creecy are not the only forces on the continent opposed to climate justice, globally and at home. In the immediate wake of the BRICS summit in Nairobi and just before the G20, “The African Leaders’ Nairobi Declaration on Climate Change and Call to Action” bears consideration in part because of relatively limited media coverage of African CJ critics’ central concerns. In the wake of the BRICS’ summit, another important contradiction is that, on the one hand, African elites are aware that strategies (such as carbon markets) exist to address the world’s most extreme market imperfection: GHGs are not internalized within the cost of products. But on the other, their standpoint is to insist that there be no unilateral corrective measures taken, such as a CBAM import penalty which would balance the high-emissions products of especially South Africa, by imposing a tariff. So the AU (2023) declaration demanded, consistent with the BRICS and BASIC statements, that “trade-related environmental tariffs and non-tariff barriers must be subject to multilateral discussions and agreements and not be unilateral, arbitrary or discriminatory measures…”

Aside from backing the continent’s mega-polluters in this particular instance, the Nairobi Declaration generally succumbed to McKinsey-style diplomacy, e.g. “We, the African Heads of State and Government… commend the Arab Republic of Egypt for the successful COP27…” (AU 2023). Egyptian dictator Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi hosted the COP27 in Sharm el-Sheikh in late 2022, an event seen by objective observers (not fellow heads of state speaking diplomatically) as a major failure in terms of both multilateral climate policy and event management, in no small part because of Egyptian elites’ cooptation by the U.S., other Western powers, the BRICS and Middle Eastern ultra-polluters. Egyptian civil society was, as ever, systematically oppressed, as has already been repeated in Dubai in 2023. To endorse the status quo means of West/BRICS-dominated climate multilateralism, is to automatically start off with a perspective hostile to Africa’s interests.

The Nairobi Declaration called “upon the international community to contribute to the following: Increasing Africa’s renewable generation capacity from 56 GW in 2022 to at least 300 GW by 2030…” (AU 2023). This ambition sounds laudable; however, within the AU’s accounting technique, ‘renewable’ includes mega-hydropower, which due to a variety of factors (including drought that debilitates dam capacity, or floods that threaten many dams’ integrity), is inappropriate. The AU host country, Ethiopia, threatens downstream Nile River communities with its Renaissance Dam, and two major proposed dams – the $100 billion+ proposed Inga Hydropower Project on the Congo River downstream from Kinshasa and Mpanda Nkua on the Zambezi River in Mozambique – would contribute to high methane emissions as riverine vegetation rots. Moreover, meeting a 300 GW target by 2030 would cost (according to an earlier draft) $600 billion, which is inconceivable given the continent’s extreme overindebtedness and the lack of a connection to genuine debt cancellation. Two of Africa’s most important economic ‘success stories’ of the 2010s, Zambia and Ghana, went into default in 2022-23.

The Nairobi Declaration insisted on “…a global transformation to a low-carbon economy is expected to require investment of at least USD 4–6 trillion per year and delivering such funding in turn requires a transformation of the financial system…” (AU 2023). But the only way such ‘transformation’ would allow investment in low-carbon capitalism of that magnitude, is if widescale nationalization of the financial sector was permitted, plus exceptionally large subsidies offered. What the AU does recognize is that currently, power relations do not permit this process. The only factor that Nairobi Declaration authors DO acknowledge is that currently, the interest rate is too high, especially given declining currency values:

“inordinate borrowing costs, typically 5 to 8 times what wealthy countries pay (the ‘great financial divide’), are a root cause of recurring developing country debt crisis and an impediment to investment in development and climate action. We call for adoption of principles of responsible sovereign lending and accountability encompassing credit rating, risk analysis and debt sustainability assessment frameworks and urge the financial markets to commit to reduce this disparity by at least 50 percent i.e from 5%-8 percent to 2.5 – 4.0 percent by 2025… incentivize global investment to locations that offer the most and substantial climate benefits…” (AU 2023).

This framing entails mild-mannered adjustments to international financing arrangements, at the margins. That may help a few borrowers, such as South Africa’s upper-middle class neighborhoods (with their obvious racial bias) or multinational extractive industries escaping the unreliable grid. Indeed, in the latter case, there are many firms now seeking to greenwash their energy inputs so as to avoid a CBAM penalty on exports, with early indications that they may end up ‘cherry picking’ the ‘low-hanging fruit’ associated with renewable energy opportunities, such as well-placed pumped energy storage. Already, their ‘wheeling’ of electricity from high-intensity solar sites – such as the Northern Cape deserts – have overwhelmed transmissions capacity there, given Eskom’s lack of investment in grid expansion in recent years. And in Africa’s most expansive financial economy, South Africa, high interest rates are required to attract capital, so even prime borrowers pay a 12 percent annual rate at best. And for equity (ownership) investors such as South Africa’s Independent Power Producers, such high returns on investment are typical (30 percent annually for venture capital), that the best solar and wind sites have already mainly been plucked (e.g. 4 GigaWatts of South Africa’s residential and small business markets’ solar panel needs during the first half of 2023 alone). There is no hope of generating the desired 300 GWs without extremely generous interest-rate write-downs or outright grants.

The African leaders’ specific appeal for lower rates (a 4 percent differential from what Western borrowers pay) will do very little to change this basic calculus given the continent’s affordability constraints and existing over-indebtedness: “a global carbon taxation regime including a carbon tax on fossil fuel trade, maritime transport and aviation, that may also be augmented by a global financial transaction tax” (AU 2023). This is certainly a laudable demand, but two problems arise. First, such carbon taxes tend to be ‘regressive’ in adversely affecting low-income rural people the most (especially with higher petrol prices), so it is vital to specify that distributive justice accompany any such fundraising.

Second, at the same time, the African leaders propose to augment state taxation with market-speculative mechanisms by, in effect, ‘privatizing the air’ through emissions trading and offsets: “Taking the lead in the development of global standards, metrics, and market mechanisms to accurately value and compensate for the protection of nature, biodiversity, socio-economic co-benefits, and the provision of climate services… Implementing a mix of measures that elevate Africa’s share of carbon markets” (AU 2023). To signal the seriousness of this gesture, the UAE announced it would buy $450 million worth of African carbon credits by 2030 (albeit in the form of a “nonbinding letter of intent”). European and U.S. representatives pledged unspecified support. (The embarrassment of Zuma’s carbon-market intervention in Zimbabwe went unmentioned.)

Ruto’s expressed desire was for African states to continue promoting high-carbon extractivism – deep mining, smelting, processing and fabrication – dominated by multinational corporations from the West and the BRICS. That will entail a commitment to protect these firms when they export minerals, metals and some finished goods to Western markets which have higher environmental standards. The Nairobi Declaration’s answer to this concern, however, would be that over time it will be renewable not fossil-fuel energy that will power extractivism: “Advancing green industrialization across the Continent by prioritizing energy-intense industries to trigger a virtuous cycle of renewable energy deployment and economic activity, with a special emphasis on adding value to Africa’s natural endowments” (AU 2023).

Yet that position runs the very real risk that as solar, wind and energy storage are rolled out across Africa, the ‘prioritization’ of extractive industries will allow the renewable sector’s low-hanging fruit to be plucked by corporations, with none left over for ordinary people. Concern is thus being raised by public-interest advocates over multinational energy corporations’ next generation of ‘green hydrogen’ exports from Africa to Europe (either in the form of battery cells or ammonia), instead of being available to local consumers (e.g. in the short term, bus and truck engines, but also potentially for widescale electricity generation). Meanwhile, the raw mineral base of a green economy, especially the hard lithium deposits in the single largest such mine – Bikita, Zimbabwe – are still being exported (by truck through Beira) without any beneficiation in spite of 2022 national legislation prohibiting such depletion. (In mid-2023, high-visibility opposition to this by the Harare-based Centre for Natural Resource Governance at least led to a brief closure of the mine.)

While the Nairobi Declaration recognizes the disproportionate impact of climate change on Africa, this was not a gathering to find solutions to the humanitarian crises that extreme weather events have already unleashed across the continent. Justice – supposedly the most crucial component of the energy transition – is not mentioned in the declaration, and it did not feature on the agenda. Perhaps unsurprisingly at a McKinsey-organized event, the focus was on monetizing the climate crisis to drive growth and development. “Has the summit merely set the stage for a new era of extractivism in the name of Western ‘green’ development?,” asked South African corporate-watchdog NGO Just Share’s Tracey Davies (2023), and answered affirmatively:

“Carbon markets featured prominently, with their potential to allow big polluters to compensate for their greenhouse gas emissions by paying to offset them against the carbon sequestration effects of Africa’s forests and mangroves. But hundreds of activists who had gathered in Nairobi from across the continent asserted that carbon markets are really a mechanism for shifting the burden of emission reductions to the global south, while giving the rest of the world a license to continue polluting. There was also a huge focus on ‘clean cooking’, with speakers from the political and business elite expressing newfound concern for the hundreds of millions of Africans who cook with wood, charcoal and kerosene. This is a crucial problem to solve. But events at the summit, such as the launch of a joint report by the International Energy Agency and the African Development Bank, indicate that the admirable objectives of those working to address it are at serious risk of being hijacked by the global gas industry. It is obvious that some bright spark (at McKinsey?) has realized that the ‘clean cooking’ campaign is a beautiful vehicle for legitimizing plans for huge fossil gas expansion across the continent.”

G20 adds AU and subtracts climate ambition in Delhi, while the UN treads water in New York

The third major summit of mid-2023 that confirmed how difficult it will be to change dynamics in the United Nations process, was the G20 in Delhi on September 8-9. Hopes for the G20 had first been sparked in October 2008, when the initial meeting in Washington DC occurred in the midst of a major financial meltdown that required international economic support and legitimacy. Without any further accomplishments over the subsequent 15 years, the accomplishment most participants and commentators described as historic was adding the African Union (AU) as a formal member of the grouping. Additionally, University of Toronto researchers who study G20 promises and accomplishments argued that the 2022 Indonesia summit set goals that were largely achieved in the subsequent year when it came to climate (consistency with the Paris Climate Agreement at 85 percent success) and sustainable development (90 percent).

Some went so far as to claim that the G20’s skillful diplomatic hosting by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi meant the network had finally become the vehicle to drive U.S. hegemony towards multipolarity, especially since the three subsequent G20 hosting functions will be in Brazil, South Africa and the United States. For economist Jeffrey Sachs (2023), at the Delhi summit,

“We saw the voice of the emerging economies say we want to have a change of the international economic order. And everybody went along with that and nobody broke the proceedings… the addition of Africa to the G20 – something I’ve been advocating for a number of years – it’s actually a pretty big deal for all the reasons that you and we have been discussing in recent weeks with the BRICS and the shifting power in the world… The discussions now move on to Brazil and Lula and he’s going to carry all of this forward in the double capacity as president of the G20 and as the key member of the BRICS. So next year we’ll have back-to-back the BRICS Summit in Kazan, Russia and we’ll have the G20 in Brazil, and I think things are actually going to change.”

Most notably, while not mentioning climate (aside from Lula also hosting the COP30 in 2025), Sachs hopes that as multipolarity emerges, the kinds of conditions that underdevelop Africa could also fall away:

“If [African countries] unite they will absolutely succeed and what we’ll see is Africa achieving seven to ten percent cumulative growth year by year in the next 40 years, like China did from 1980 to 2020, like India is doing from 2000 to 2040. Africa will be on the same path with the 20-year delay, I would say 20-year starting point. But what we’re going to see is a huge transformation if the Africans do what they really look like they’re doing right now, and that is uniting because as one continental economy that defends its interests and pursues its interests together in global venues and global leadership. It’s going to be a very different and very positive world.”

The structural features of climate crisis, over-indebtedness, primary-product export dependency, and vassal status to multinational corporations and Western donors – which West African military regimes may briefly interrupt but only at the level of who in the state manages the process – remain intact, if the BRICS multipolarity agenda continues to amplify the existing power structure. After all, remarked Adriano Nuvunga, chair of Mozambique’s Center for Democracy and Development, “The AU is an organization that primarily represents the interests of the powerful. It is toothless and ineffective, and it repeatedly proves itself incapable of ensuring prosperity, security, and peace for all Africans” (Cascais 2023).

The Nairobi summit had confirmed that in terms of climate policy, the powerful – in Africa and the G20 alike – are committed to privatizing the air and selling the right to pollute in carbon markets, so it was no surprise that so little emerged from Delhi to encourage environmentalists. There was a vague commitment to tripling renewable energy capacity (with no specific new subsidization mechanisms provided), which International Energy Agency Director Fatih Birol (2023) termed “far from being enough to be in line with the 1.5C target,” or to address widespread fossil addictions. Revealingly, just as at the 2021 COP26 in Glasgow, when the imperial/sub-imperial U.S., China and India alliance united to adopt “phase down” language in relation to coal, the G20 again avoided the term “phase out” or indeed mention of other fossil fuels other than coal. The prior year’s G20 host, Indonesian President Joko Widodo (Cabinet Secretariat of the Republic of Indonesia 2023), criticized the lack of generous climate financing, terming the Delhi commitments mere ‘rhetoric.’

For Modi, the main symbolic disappointments were the no-shows of Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin. Modi won establishment praise for his global bio​​fuel alliance, along with the US and Brazil, to “help accelerate global efforts to meet net-zero emissions targets by facilitating trade in biofuels derived from sources including plant and animal waste,” although biofuels are also a threat to global food production due to competition for cropland. As Indian agricultural expert Devinder Sharma put it, this was “nothing short of historic blunder”, because the G20 should “think of feeding humans first, automobiles can wait. Food should never be diverted for activities that have nothing to do with domestic food security” (Mukherji 2023).

According to economist Jayati Ghosh (2023), the G20 also failed repeatedly at the level of geopolitics, where so much pressure on world grain prices emanated in 2022 in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. On this point, she argued, the G20 under Modi was “backtracking from the statement in Bali, the Indonesian presidency, in which the invasion by Russia of Ukraine was condemned and in which there was a request for the withdrawal immediately.” Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov was pleased by the declaration because, as Ghosh (2023) pointed out, the G7 sees “the current leadership in India as more important to court than standing up for… Ukraine or even for human rights in India and other countries.” Ghosh (2023) continued,

“What is most appalling is that this G20 has done nothing for the major problems of our time… [in spite of] the major disasters that are occurring across the world… So, there was nothing, really, on any meaningful movement on climate change. There was nothing on resolving the major debt crisis, which in about 80 countries today is worsening the possibilities of dealing with climate change, as well. And yet this was an issue that India had made one of the major concerns of its presidency. Modi had actually said, ‘We are going to work towards a resolution of the debt crisis.’ Nothing on that. A terrible silence on the lack of taxation strategies, for example, wealth taxes on the very rich and sharing of information that would enable that, or even a better deal for corporate taxation than the one that is currently on the table. Nothing in terms of finding the resources that would enable countries to deal with not just the mitigation, but right now just the dealing with the impacts of climate change that so many are facing.”

Two weeks later, the United Nations leaders’ summit in New York confirmed Ghosh’s critique of elite paralysis. Secretary-General António Guterres (2023) summed up:

“Horrendous heat is having horrendous effects. Distraught farmers watching crops carried away by floods, sweltering temperatures spawning disease and thousands fleeing in fear as historic fires rage. Climate action is dwarfed by the scale of the challenge… Humanity has opened the gates of hell.”

A revival of New York climate protests – albeit far smaller than the 2014 and 2019 efforts – attempted to reflect the crisis and dissent, for as Amy Goodman and Denis Moynihan (2023) remarked, “75,000 people marched through Manhattan, rallying near the United Nations headquarters. Though it was a message to world leaders, the banner on the rally stage read, ‘Biden: End Fossil Fuels’… with 149 protesters arrested outside of New York’s Federal Reserve Bank, as part of a growing movement challenging the financial backers of the fossil fuel industry.” Targets included “the Museum of Modern Art, for its close connection to its billionaire patron, Henry Kravis, cofounder of Wall Street investment firm KKR. Among the chants at the many protests was, ‘We need clean air, not another billionaire!’”

Conclusion: Africa’s hope may (?) rise from sub-imperialist South Africa’s dissidents

Dissenters against global climate elites have evolved since the early 2000s, when aspects of African climate justice were championed by high-profile world-class leaders, whose organizing is worthy of study. But first, what were their narratives, both in Africa and internationally? The CJ agenda built up in both global protest sites – especially the COPs – as well as from grassroots-based climate-conscious settings. Some included sites of climate catastrophes, especially in Southern Africa. But in making these geographical and scalar jumps, differences in demands between CJ and ordinary ‘climate action’ have become more obvious. Consider some examples of narratives related to CJ demands:

+ African activists, unlike their leaders, regularly use terms like reparations and ‘climate debt.’

+ When it comes to the often-tokenistic climate finance offered by the West, CJ activists insist on grants, not further piling up of foreign-currency-denominated debt.

+ CJ strategists have long suggested ways – such as ‘Million Climate Jobs’ in South Africa – that financing should contribute to bottom-up Just Transitions, not the Washington-London-Frankfurt-Paris-Brussels JETP variety suffered in South Africa.

+ When it comes to technology, CJ activists oppose Intellectual Property restraints on public-good technology (solar, wind and energy storage).

+ CJ activists despair at the privatized version of renewable energy on offer in most sites, with minimal options for collective ownership and management of local electricity grids.

+ Their energy-justice demands include Free Basic Electricity and other feminist-oriented decommodification strategies.

+ CJ activists put great efforts into participation, consultation and diversity, especially given how much climate crisis affects women, indigenous people, race and ethnicity, class and other identity components, in part because the present unjust burdens of loss, damage, adaptation and mitigation costs affect these groups the most.

+ CJ activists also insist on leaving Africa’s fossil fuels underground, and they valiantly fight both onshore and offshore exploration.

+ Some CJ activists argue that a downpayment on high-emitters’ climate debt is one way to compensate for resulting lost revenue, provided the funding gets straight to the people (e.g. according to a Basic Income Grant model used in Otjivero, Nambia in the early 2010s).

+ And many CJ activists advocate versions of ‘climate sanctions’ – e.g., divestment of $50 trillion in institutional investor assets out of fossil fuels, driven by international NGOs; or Xi’s September 2021 curtailment of coal-fired power plants along the Belt&Road; or even a (redesigned) climate sanctions promoted through European border tariffs – if it helps in their battles against high-carbon and high-methane-powered smelters, deep mining and other inappropriate energy guzzlers, and if revenues from such tariffs are circulated back to repay Europe’s climate debt.

These are some of the areas where the CJ tradition departs from mainstream climate policy. But the true test of the power struggle in this life-and-death situation continues to be the way such narratives are translated into climate protest and other pressure points aimed at shifting the views of the powerful, or weakening them. These include whether or not to legitimize elites, and how; where formal processes turn narratives into valuable – or on the other hand, coopted – engagements with otherwise-debilitating elite power structures; and lessons from the prior Africa-wide campaign that two decades ago resolved a major crisis: anti-retroviral medicine-access via a powerful multilateral system that made a substantial concession, thus raising life expectancy across the continent dramatically.

In that latter case, victory in the World Trade Organization in 2001 came from the combination of local dissent – led in South Africa by the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) not only against their AIDS-denialist president (Thabo Mbeki) but against Big Pharma’s branch plants and Western government embassies – and global advocacy with international health NGOs (especially Medicins sans Frontieres) and social movements based in imperialist countries (especially ACTUP! in many United States cities). When in 1999 TAC began its international advocacy, it was inconceivable that the demand for free, generic, locally-produced AIDS-drug cocktails (then costing $10,000 annually) would be made available through African countries’ decimated public health systems (Bond 1999). But a United Nations Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB and Malaria did provide funding (as did the U.S. government’s PEPFAR), thus – along with the Montreal Protocol which halted CFC emissions (thus reversing ozone hold damage) – serving as two global-scale precedents for what could be done if the balance of forces is finally shifted toward climate justice.

There is certainly potential for an African grassroots groundswell to rise up in the way so many African AIDS activists showed possible two decades ago, putting pressure on both their leaders and world elites (Heywood 2021). There is also the likelihood that the likes of Ramaphosa and Ruto continue to fail their constituencies. In that case, leadership from high profile activists will continue to condemn the elites, as has long been practiced by the likes of the late Wangari Maatthei, a Kenyan forest protector who became a Nobel Prize laureate and deputy minister; Nnimmo Bassey, a Nigerian architect and poet whose Niger Delta organising was recognised through the Right Livelihood Award; Ambassador Di-Aping, who after the Copenhagen COP15 was essentially banned from advocacy there but stayed active in other settings such “Rights of Future Generations” advocacy; scholar-activist Boaventura Monjane from the Mozambican peasant movement and University of the Western Cape Institute for Poverty, Land and Agrarian Studies; Kenyan NGO organizers Mithika Mwenda and Augustine Njamnshi, who founded a network – PACJA – with more than 1000 member groups; Mozambican Friends of the Earth chapter leader Anabela Lemos; Zimbabwean Centre for Natural Resource Governance founder Farai Maguwu; and most importantly, as the continent’s leading youth voice, Ugandan activist Vanessa Nakate. Some are also leaders of the 27-member Africa Climate Justice Collective which staged a Counter COP in late September 2023, and whose perspective is based on delegitimization and boycotting of the UN process, which contrasts with the combined insider-lobbying and protest that PACJA has carried out since 2009. Behind the local, continental and global leadership and movement-building, are grassroots activists who from the early 2000s have been articulating CJ approaches (Mwenda and Bond 2020).

That process began in Africa in 2004, when the Durban Group for Climate Justice formed from an international conference in order to critique the emerging system of carbon markets and offsets that had been mandated by global elites at the Kyoto COP in 1997. Others from South Africa straddled local, continental and global struggle scales in advocating climate justice: Kumi Naidoo, a Durban anti-apartheid activist who became head of Greenpeace International from 2009-15; Indian Ocean ‘Wild Coast’ activists Nonhle Mbuthuma and Sinegugu Zukula who successfully opposed offshore gas and sand mining; EarthLife Africa’s leader Makoma Lekalakala; Rural Women’s Assembly co-founder Mercia Andrews; Samantha Hargreaves and Trusha Reddy of the Women in Mining anti-extractivism network; Sunny Morgan of Debt4Climate; Vishwas Satgar, Charles Simane, Ferrial Adam, Awande Buthelezi, Janet Cherry and others in the Climate Justice Charter Movement which reaches furthest into eco-socialist networks; award-winning filmmaker Rehad Desai; groundWork NGO founder Bobby Peek; Green Connection’s Liziwe McDaid who helped catalyze widespread anti-gas coastal protests; Desmond D’Sa of the South Durban Community Environmental Alliance; environmental sociologist Jacklyn Cock; Malik Dasoo and Anita Khanna from Extinction Rebellion; Ferron Pedro of 350.org and Alex Lenferna of the Climate Justice Alliance which seek stronger ties to labour; and exceptionally tough lawyers at the Centre for Environmental Rights, Legal Resources Centre and Cullinan and Associates who support them.

In spite of fractured political traditions which mean there are sometimes several different and competing ideological currents and strategic orientations within the climate activist scene, their spurts of intense activism have sometimes paid off against Ramaphosa, Mantashe, Creecy and the local and multinational fossil corporations which, like Shell and Copelyn, feed South Africa’s politicians generous campaign contributions. Activist sites include beaches and petrol stations (of Shell and Total) where hundreds of protests have occurred against gas exploration since late 2021, Johnny Copelyn’s hotels, the headquarters of Eskom and the energy and environment ministries, Standard Bank (Africa’s largest, a prolific fossil-fuel financier), oil companies’ headquarters (especially Sasol and Total), a military supply firm associated with both Israel and offshore gas extraction (Paramount Group), and the World Bank’s Johannesburg and Pretoria offices. The latter institution was also on the African activist radar, attracting more than a thousand protesters in Morocco where the Bank’s Annual Meeting was held in mid-October.

Because African grassroots opponents of big polluters, their financiers and states which support them will intensify, the nuances of climate politics at global scale are often lost. But when a Nairobi Real Africa Climate Summit full of activists pinpoints obscure targets such as technological-fix false solutions and carbon markets, and when in many concrete settings the detailed critiques of polluting projects are subject to citizen scrutiny, there are often encouraging advances. The ideology of climate justice may, at some stage, intensify to full-fledged eco-socialism, instead of being dragged backwards to versions of climate action and ecological-modernization market and tech-fix strategies, as the elites seek. But the need to maintain profound skepticism about power relations within COPs and the narratives that flow from global climate politics, never fades – especially in Dubai in 2023 and what is likely to be a fossil-addicted Eastern European host in 2024, before moving to the Amazon where perhaps the balance of forces will be improved in 2025.

(A version of this article will appear in the Journal of Peasant Studies.)

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The post How the BRICS+, Africa Climate Summit, G20 and UN Prepare Us for Planetary Arson appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Patrick Bond.

Photograph Source: 朱華龍 – Zhu Hua Long – CC BY 2.0

In early 2023, India surpassed China as the most populous country in the world with the latter having 850,000 fewer people by the end of 2022—marking the country’s first population decline since famine struck from 1959 to 1961. While this reduction may seem modest considering China’s 1.4 billion population currently, an ongoing decline is anticipated, with UN projections suggesting that China’s population could dwindle to below 800 million by 2100.

Populations fluctuate through immigration, emigration, deaths, and births. China’s previous one-child policy, enforced from 1980 to 2015, and the resulting gender imbalance slowed its birth rate. The Chinese government is now trying to boost birth rates, including by discouraging abortion.

The Malthusian population growth model, proposed in the 1700s, suggested that populations grow exponentially and outpace resource availability until inevitable checks, such as famine, disease, conflict, or other issues, cause it to drop. During the high global population growth rates of the early 1960s, these concerns abounded. Yet around the world, population growth has slowed dramatically, and in China and many other countries, natural decline is already underway.

A 2020 study published in the Lancet medical journal revealed that based on current population trends, more than 20 countries are on track to halve their populations by 2100. The Pew Research think tank, meanwhile, declared that 90 countries will see their populations decline by 2100, while the Center of Expertise on Population and Migration (CEPAM) predicts the global population will peak at 9.8 billion around 2070 to 2080.

The fear of a shrinking and aging population looms over governments and economists alike. Increased payments toward pension and social welfare systems will strain a reduced labor force, while younger populations also contribute more to economic growth and innovation. Countries may also experience a reduction in their global influence—not least because of a smaller population available for military service.

Various metrics gauge fertility and birth rates, but the total fertility rate (TFR), which measures the number of children a woman will have in her lifetime, is the most common. Yet achieving replacement level fertility rates, typically 2.1 children per woman, has proven challenging.

The decline in global fertility rates can be attributed to societal and cultural shifts, family planning initiatives, wider access to contraception, improved infant mortality rates, increased cost of child-rearing, urbanization, delayed marriages and childbirth due to educational and career pursuits, and social welfare systems reducing reliance on familial support.

A case in point is Japan, whose population peaked at 128 million in 2008 and has since shrunk to below 123 million. It is poised to decrease to 72 million by century’s end, its decline sustained by a low fertility rate, an aging population (almost 30 percent of the population is 65 or older), and limited immigration. Initiatives to slow this decline include changing immigration laws and government-sponsored speed dating.

Remarkably, despite hitting a record low in 2022, Japan’s TFR is now higher than China’s and South Korea’s. Since 2006, South Korea has invested more than $200 billion in establishing public daycare centers, free nurseries, subsidized child care, and other initiatives to boost its TFR. But at 0.78, South Korea’s TFR remains the world’s lowest. South Korea’s government also introduced immigration reforms in the early 21st century, all while leading the world in automation with 1,000 robots per 10,000 employees—more than double of second-ranked Japan.

In Europe, efforts to boost populations have occurred for decades. For instance, Romaniacriminalized abortion and banned contraception except for certain medical conditions in 1966. Consequently, illegal abortions increased, and Romania had the highest maternal mortality rate in Europe in the 1980s as a result of this. While Romania’s TFR stabilized at 2.3 by the late 1980s, it collapsed in the 1990s, alongside a population exodus through emigration that has been sustained after Romania joined the EU in 2007.

Other Eastern European nations have experienced similar TFR declines and emigration. Contrastingly, Western European countries have managed to grow slightly since 2000, but largely only due to immigration. Even so, countries like Italy have seen population declines, spurring initiatives by the government to offer houses to foreigners for as little as 1 euro in an effort to repopulate small towns.

The U.S. has a lower average age than most European countries and saw a rebound in TFR rates in the 2000s. But this dropped after the recession in 2008 and it has never recovered. And unlike European countries, life expectancy continued to decline after COVID-19. Immigration has mitigated these issues, but as in Europe this has become increasingly political, and the U.S. population growth rate has slowed considerably. While there is no official policy to boost birth rates, the U.S. promotes family planning initiatives abroad. Republican and Democrat administrations have meanwhile oscillated since 1984 between enforcing and rescinding the Mexico City Policy, requiring foreign NGOs to not “perform or actively promote abortion as a method of family planning” in order to receive U.S. government funding for family planning initiatives.

Russia’s TFR faced a rapid decline following the collapse of the Soviet Union, reaching a low of 1.16 in 1999, and causing a population decline. However, government initiatives saw it rebound to 1.8 in 2014 before falling again. The Kremlin announced a desired TFR of 1.7 in 2020, and increased payments for parents of at least two children. To further stabilize its population, Russia has also relied on immigration and taking parts of Ukraine.

Iran’s birth rate policies have fluctuated over the last few decades. During the 1950s, Iran implemented fertility controls but abolished them after the 1979 Islamic revolution. However, they were reintroduced in the late 1980s to release pressure on the economy. Once seen as a “success story,” Iran’s TFR fell faster than anticipated to 1.6 in 2012. That year, the government began attempts to boost the birth rate by limiting access to birth control, abortion, and vasectomies.

Although India now holds the mantle of the world’s most populous country, its TFR is now below replacement level. Nonetheless, its population will continue to grow, fueled by a large, youthful population—a demographic feature increasingly common across the Global South. While India’s population is eventually projected to begin declining by the 2060s, India is currently managing its youthful population through initiatives such as promoting employment opportunities abroad.

The perils of not utilizing a large working population extend beyond unrealized economic potential. Without economic prospects, large youthful populations can generate significant social and political upheaval. Neighboring Pakistan is trying to reduce its population growth to avoid exacerbating strains on resources, infrastructure, education, and health care systems.

Pakistan’s concerns are similar to much of Africa. Aside from Afghanistan, the top 20 countries with the highest TFR are all located in Africa. Nigeria’s population is projected to grow from 213 million currently to 550 million in 2100, while some projections see half of all births in Africa between 2020 and 2100. Even so, family planning programs have helped slow growth in recent years across the continent.

Contrastingly, the experience of countries where campaigns supporting fertility have seen some success (including Germany, the Czech Republic, and Hungary) suggests direct financial incentives, tax breaks, cheap/free child care centers, generous maternity/paternity leave, housing assistance, and more flexible approaches to work-life balance are successful at interrupting decline.

While gender equality has often been cited as a barrier to higher birth rates in the past, this no longer seems to be the case. Highly educated women had the lowest fertility rate in the U.S. in 1980, for example, but this was not true in 2019. Additionally, Mongolia’s TFR declined from 7.3 kids per woman in 1974 to under two by 2005. But Mongolian birth rates then increased to around three children per woman by 2019, despite Mongolian women becoming better educated, increasingly represented in traditionally male-dominated fields, and having access to improved rural maternal health services.

Nonetheless, Mongolia’s recent population boom has resulted in school crowding, pollution, housing problems, and other issues, and points to the need for flexible approaches to population growth, decline, and stabilization.

With a median age in Europe of 44.4 years old and a median age of about 19 in Africa, different parts of the world will require different measures to deal with fluctuating population numbers this century. China is not alone in the perception that it will grow old before it grows rich, and such countries will develop their own methods to deal with aging societies. Seeking the creation of long-term sustainable approaches to population management, which avoid coercion but also provide help for those raising children, should be prioritized.

This article was produced by Globetrotter.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by John P. Ruehl.

When Stanford researchers crunched the numbers, they found that Wednesday, June 7 was the worst day of pollution from wildfire smoke in the nation’s history, in terms of the average American’s smoke exposure. Air quality plummeted across the Eastern United States, affecting cities from Charlotte to Philadelphia to Chicago. But in no city was the air worse than the Big Apple. The air quality index, or AQI, in parts of Brooklyn reached 484 — nearly double San Francisco’s highest hourly reading during California’s 2020 fire season. In a press conference on Wednesday afternoon, New York Governor Kathy Hochul called it “a health and environmental crisis,” and urged residents to take precautions. New York City Mayor Eric Adams said the situation was “alarming and concerning,” and told people to mask up and stay indoors. 

But advocates and public health experts that Grist spoke to described officials’ efforts as slow and confused. Mask distribution efforts came well after the pollution had descended over the tri-state area. As global temperature rise fuels more powerful and frequent blazes across the continent, experts warn that even cities like New York that have not historically experienced wildfire smoke must step up their emergency preparedness efforts to keep vulnerable people safe. 

“It’s been a lackluster, underwhelming, frankly problematic response by the City of New York,” said Lincoln Restler, a city council member who represents northern Brooklyn, in an interview. The city had received advance warnings about the impending pollution from state and federal authorities, he added, but “there was essentially no communication shy of a tweet for 36 hours into this crisis.”

Smoke from wildfires is a major public health risk since it contains fine particles that can lodge in lung tissue and other pollutants that can aggravate the respiratory system. Short-term exposure to this type of pollution has been linked to higher rates of asthma hospitalization and heart attacks. Like most public health threats, it doesn’t impact everyone equally. Older adults, pregnant people, and children are particularly vulnerable to exposure, especially if they live in areas that already experience a disproportionate amount of pollution. 

In New York, that means places like the South Bronx, where a combination of highway traffic and heavy trucking near warehouses contributes to chronically unhealthy air. According to Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, the neighborhood has one of the highest rates of asthma in the country, and Black and Latino patients account for more than 80 percent of asthma cases across the city. 

“You have those chronic cumulative exposures for people who live in areas that are already more polluted, and then you’re stacking on now this intense shorter-term exposure to their long-term exposures,” said Jennifer Vanos, an associate professor in the School of Sustainability at Arizona State University who studies extreme heat and air pollution.

City officials know where the most vulnerable New Yorkers live and should have done more this week to protect them, said Eddie Bautista, the executive director of the New York City Environmental Justice Alliance, a nonprofit organization that works to advance environmental health in disadvantaged neighborhoods. He mentioned a program that his organization pushed the city to implement at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, which distributed air conditioning units to low-income households so that they could stay cool and socially distant during heatwaves. He wondered aloud why local agencies did not take comparable measures this week, like quickly getting N95 masks to elderly people. 

“Like a lot of other people, I’m just stunned at how slow the response was,” he said. “Now we’re bracing ourselves for who knows what upticks in ER visits over the next week.”

A growing body of research backs up his fears. In 2020, researchers at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver found that pollution from wildfires increased asthma-related calls for ambulances within one hour of exposure. A separate study from the California Department of Public Health noted increased incidents of cardiac arrest after wildfires in people 35 and older. Experts told Grist it will take weeks to understand whether hospitalization rates in the city increased as a result of the smoke exposure. 

On Wednesday night, the city announced locations where New York City residents could pick up free N95 masks on Thursday. But some workers and advocates said the message came too late. Gustavo Ajche, a delivery bike worker and founder of Los Deliveristas Unidos, a collective of app delivery workers, told Grist that he did his rounds as usual on Tuesday, but by the end of the day he felt lightheaded and his throat hurt. On Wednesday, he was able to get through the day using an N95 mask. 

“I think the city’s response lacked efficiency,” he told Grist in Spanish. “The smoke affected us since Tuesday, so since Tuesday there should have been a plan implemented to get more New Yorkers to mask up.”

Asked to respond to the critiques of the city’s response to the crisis, the mayor’s office referred Grist to a video of a Thursday morning press conference where Adams described the developing conditions and urged residents, once again, to don face masks.

“We clearly understand that these crises that we are facing around our health are something that we’re going to have to deal with,” he said. “Climate change is real and we must be prepared.”

Public health experts that Grist spoke to described actions that New York, and other cities, could take in the future to safeguard vulnerable residents from smoke-related health risks. They mentioned better-coordinated mask distribution, text alerts in advance of worsening conditions, and risk communication with business owners so that they can protect their staff. Officials could also implement programs to provide homeless people with emergency shelter and low-income and at-risk city dwellers with air purifiers and other materials that could improve their indoor air quality, since some people live in drafty old buildings that lack air filtration. 

“Just because you’re indoors, you’re not necessarily safe from the impacts, because sometimes your indoor air quality is really, really poor,” said Mary Prunicki, director of the Sean N. Parker Center for Allergy and Asthma Research at Stanford University. In severe cases, “people who have the means may have already left the area, but that’s just not an option for a lot of people.”

Events like this week’s will likely become more common in cities that are unaccustomed to wildfire smoke as human-induced climate change increases the power and frequency of blazes across the world. Canada is currently experiencing what may be its worst wildfire season ever, with hundreds of forests burning across the country. Experts say that an effective emergency response plan is key to keeping people safe.

“You want to hear your local government officials, your local university officials, and your local hospital officials all putting out information,” Scott Sklar, a professor at George Washington University’s School of Engineering and Applied Science, told Grist. A city the size of New York has the capacity to prepare itself for a climate impact like this one. Nevertheless, he said, “we weren’t quite ready for it.”

Zoya Teirstein and Jake Bittle contributed reporting to this story.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline How NYC officials failed to prepare for an air quality crisis on Jun 8, 2023.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Lylla Younes.

"Wealthy G7 countries like to cast themselves as saviors but what they are is operating a deadly double standard—they play by one set of rules while their former colonies are forced to play by another," Oxfam International's interim executive director, Amitabh Behar, lamented. "It's do as I say, not as I do."

"It's the rich world that owes the Global South," said Behar. "The aid they promised decades ago but never gave. The huge costs from climate damage caused by their reckless burning of fossil fuels. The immense wealth built on colonialism and slavery."

"The G7 must pay its due. This isn't about benevolence or charity—it's a moral obligation."

Recent peer-reviewed research detailing how the prioritization of capitalist class interests has reproduced inequality between nations over time found that the Global North has "drained" more than $152 trillion from the Global South since 1960, and climate justice advocates stress that this plunder is reflected in rich countries' outsized share of historic and present greenhouse gas pollution.

According to Oxfam's new analysis, planet-heating emissions attributed to the G7 inflicted $8.7 trillion in climate change-related loss and damage on developing countries between 1979 and 2019—a figure that has since increased and will continue to grow.

At the United Nations COP27 climate conference last year, delegates agreed to establish a loss and damage fund after failing to commit to phasing out the fossil fuels causing so much harm. It remains to be seen how the new fund will operate, but Oxfam on Wednesday condemned G7 members for continuing to push for public investment in fracked gas and oil development despite vowing to wind down climate-wrecking dirty energy production at a faster rate.

Previous efforts to facilitate climate aid from the Global North to the Global South have fallen far short of what's needed due to the stinginess of wealthy countries, especially the United States.

In 2009, developed nations agreed at COP15 to allocate $100 billion in green finance per year to the developing world by 2020 and every year after through 2025, at which point a new goal would be established. However, only $83.3 billion was mobilized in the first year, and governments are not expected to hit their annual target, which has been denounced as woefully inadequate, until this year.

Based on Oxfam's calculations, the G7 is $72 billion behind on the pledge to help impoverished countries ramp up clean energy and respond to increasingly frequent and intense extreme weather.

Oxfam's $13.3 trillion estimate is based on a combination of the $8.7 trillion in uncompensated climate destruction caused by the G7 since 1979 and its $72 billion climate finance shortfall, plus nearly $4.5 trillion in unfulfilled development funding.

In 1970, rich nations including the G7 agreed to spend 0.7% of their gross national income (GNI) on Official Development Assistance (ODA). As of last year, however, they had provided just 0.27%. For their part, G7 members contributed a total of $2.8 trillion in ODA from 1970 to 2022, leaving a cumulative gap of $4.49 trillion between what they promised and what they've delivered.

"This money could have been transformational," said Behar. "It could have paid for children to go to school, hospitals, and lifesaving medicines, improving access to water, better roads, agriculture and food security, and so much more. The G7 must pay its due. This isn't about benevolence or charity—it's a moral obligation."

The upcoming G7 meeting, held this year in Japan, gives members of the powerful club a perfect opportunity to make good on their unmet commitments to uplift the poor, Oxfam said.

"G7 leaders are meeting at a moment where billions of workers face real-term pay cuts and impossible rises in the prices of basics like food," Oxfam pointed out. "Global hunger has risen for a fifth consecutive year, while extreme wealth and extreme poverty have increased simultaneously for the first time in 25 years."

"Two hundred fifty-eight million people across 58 countries are currently experiencing acute hunger, up 34% over the last year," the organization continued. "In East Africa alone, drought and conflict have left a record 36 million people facing extreme hunger, nearly equivalent to the population of Canada. Oxfam estimates that up to two people are likely dying from hunger every minute in Ethiopia, Kenya Somalia, and South Sudan."

Meanwhile, "the fortunes of the world's 260 food billionaires have increased by $381 billion since 2020," Oxfam noted. "Synthetic fertilizer corporations increased their profits by ten times on average in 2022. According to the IMF, the 48 countries most affected by the global food crisis face an additional $9 billion in import bills in 2022 and 2023."

"The G7 is home to 1,123 billionaires with a combined wealth of $6.5 trillion," said Oxfam. "Their wealth has grown in real terms by 45% over the past ten years. A wealth tax on the G7's millionaires starting at just 2%, and 5% on billionaires, could generate $900 billion a year. This is money that could be used to help ordinary people in G7 countries and in the Global South who are facing rising prices and falling wages."

Oxfam called on G7 governments to take the following steps immediately:

• Cancel debts of low- and middle-income countries that need it;
• Return to the 0.7% of GNI aid target, pay off aid arrears, and meet their commitment to provide $100 billion annually to help poorer countries cope with climate change;
• Bring in new taxes on rich individuals and corporations; and
• Expedite the reallocation of at least $100 billion of the existing Special Drawing Rights (SDR) issuance to low- and middle-income countries and commit to at least two new $650 billion issuances by 2030.

"Each and every day, the Global South pays hundreds of millions of dollars to the G7 and their rich bankers. This has to stop," Behar said. "It's time to call the G7's hypocrisy for what it is: an attempt to dodge responsibility and maintain the neo-colonial status quo."

The need for debt relief and redistribution is only poised to grow.

"At least an additional $27.4 trillion is needed between now and 2030 to fill financing gaps in health, education, social protection, and tackling climate change in low- and middle-income countries," Oxfam estimates. "That equates to an annual financing gap of $3.9 trillion."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Newswire Editor.

"Wealthy G7 countries like to cast themselves as saviors but what they are is operating a deadly double standard—they play by one set of rules while their former colonies are forced to play by another," Oxfam International's interim executive director, Amitabh Behar, lamented. "It's do as I say, not as I do."

"It's the rich world that owes the Global South," said Behar. "The aid they promised decades ago but never gave. The huge costs from climate damage caused by their reckless burning of fossil fuels. The immense wealth built on colonialism and slavery."

"The G7 must pay its due. This isn't about benevolence or charity—it's a moral obligation."

Recent peer-reviewed research detailing how the prioritization of capitalist class interests has reproduced inequality between nations over time found that the Global North has "drained" more than $152 trillion from the Global South since 1960, and climate justice advocates stress that this plunder is reflected in rich countries' outsized share of historic and present greenhouse gas pollution.

According to Oxfam's new analysis, planet-heating emissions attributed to the G7 inflicted $8.7 trillion in climate change-related loss and damage on developing countries between 1979 and 2019—a figure that has since increased and will continue to grow.

At the United Nations COP27 climate conference last year, delegates agreed to establish a loss and damage fund after failing to commit to phasing out the fossil fuels causing so much harm. It remains to be seen how the new fund will operate, but Oxfam on Wednesday condemned G7 members for continuing to push for public investment in fracked gas and oil development despite vowing to wind down climate-wrecking dirty energy production at a faster rate.

Previous efforts to facilitate climate aid from the Global North to the Global South have fallen far short of what's needed due to the stinginess of wealthy countries, especially the United States.

In 2009, developed nations agreed at COP15 to allocate $100 billion in green finance per year to the developing world by 2020 and every year after through 2025, at which point a new goal would be established. However, only $83.3 billion was mobilized in the first year, and governments are not expected to hit their annual target, which has been denounced as woefully inadequate, until this year.

Based on Oxfam's calculations, the G7 is $72 billion behind on the pledge to help impoverished countries ramp up clean energy and respond to increasingly frequent and intense extreme weather.

Oxfam's $13.3 trillion estimate is based on a combination of the $8.7 trillion in uncompensated climate destruction caused by the G7 since 1979 and its $72 billion climate finance shortfall, plus nearly $4.5 trillion in unfulfilled development funding.

In 1970, rich nations including the G7 agreed to spend 0.7% of their gross national income (GNI) on Official Development Assistance (ODA). As of last year, however, they had provided just 0.27%. For their part, G7 members contributed a total of $2.8 trillion in ODA from 1970 to 2022, leaving a cumulative gap of $4.49 trillion between what they promised and what they've delivered.

"This money could have been transformational," said Behar. "It could have paid for children to go to school, hospitals, and lifesaving medicines, improving access to water, better roads, agriculture and food security, and so much more. The G7 must pay its due. This isn't about benevolence or charity—it's a moral obligation."

The upcoming G7 meeting, held this year in Japan, gives members of the powerful club a perfect opportunity to make good on their unmet commitments to uplift the poor, Oxfam said.

"G7 leaders are meeting at a moment where billions of workers face real-term pay cuts and impossible rises in the prices of basics like food," Oxfam pointed out. "Global hunger has risen for a fifth consecutive year, while extreme wealth and extreme poverty have increased simultaneously for the first time in 25 years."

"Two hundred fifty-eight million people across 58 countries are currently experiencing acute hunger, up 34% over the last year," the organization continued. "In East Africa alone, drought and conflict have left a record 36 million people facing extreme hunger, nearly equivalent to the population of Canada. Oxfam estimates that up to two people are likely dying from hunger every minute in Ethiopia, Kenya Somalia, and South Sudan."

Meanwhile, "the fortunes of the world's 260 food billionaires have increased by $381 billion since 2020," Oxfam noted. "Synthetic fertilizer corporations increased their profits by ten times on average in 2022. According to the IMF, the 48 countries most affected by the global food crisis face an additional $9 billion in import bills in 2022 and 2023."

"The G7 is home to 1,123 billionaires with a combined wealth of $6.5 trillion," said Oxfam. "Their wealth has grown in real terms by 45% over the past ten years. A wealth tax on the G7's millionaires starting at just 2%, and 5% on billionaires, could generate $900 billion a year. This is money that could be used to help ordinary people in G7 countries and in the Global South who are facing rising prices and falling wages."

Oxfam called on G7 governments to take the following steps immediately:

• Cancel debts of low- and middle-income countries that need it;
• Return to the 0.7% of GNI aid target, pay off aid arrears, and meet their commitment to provide $100 billion annually to help poorer countries cope with climate change;
• Bring in new taxes on rich individuals and corporations; and
• Expedite the reallocation of at least $100 billion of the existing Special Drawing Rights (SDR) issuance to low- and middle-income countries and commit to at least two new $650 billion issuances by 2030.

"Each and every day, the Global South pays hundreds of millions of dollars to the G7 and their rich bankers. This has to stop," Behar said. "It's time to call the G7's hypocrisy for what it is: an attempt to dodge responsibility and maintain the neo-colonial status quo."

The need for debt relief and redistribution is only poised to grow.

"At least an additional $27.4 trillion is needed between now and 2030 to fill financing gaps in health, education, social protection, and tackling climate change in low- and middle-income countries," Oxfam estimates. "That equates to an annual financing gap of $3.9 trillion."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Newswire Editor.

With scientists pointing to a number of weather patterns this year that have already signified that the El Niño Southern Oscillation may amplify planetary heating in the coming months, one heat and public health expert said Monday that officials must take advantage of the time they have now to prepare their communities for potential extreme heat events in the United States and around the world.

"We will likely see a significant impact from El Niño in the 2023 heat season," said Ashley Ward, a senior policy associate at Duke University's Nicholas Institute for Energy, Environment & Sustainability. "While El Niño is still forming this year, we need to prepare for the 2024 heat season to likely be worse."

Ward said the last time scientists observed the kind of significant heat caused by El Niño that they're expecting to see this year was in 2016, which is tied with 2020 for the hottest year on record.

As climate researcher Leon Simons said last week regarding current ocean warming trends, scientists are currently observing heat patterns that look "very much like the 1997 and 2015 early stages of a Super El Niño," which is marked by very high temperatures in the Pacific Ocean near the equator.

"Based on the year-to-date and the current El Niño forecast," wrote Zeke Hausfather at Carbon Brief late last month, "2023 is very likely to end up between the warmest year on record and the sixth warmest, with a best estimate of fourth warmest."

Ward called on officials at the state and local level to take the next several weeks to "develop response plans for periods of extreme heat that address how to reach both urban and rural populations."

"This is the time to direct our energies and efforts toward preparedness and readiness, particularly to protect our most vulnerable citizens from the impact of extreme heat," said Ward.

Extreme heat has devastated parts of the world, including the U.S., in recent years.

Temperature records were broken in Vietnam and Laos last week, with the northern district of Tuong Duong recording a high of 111.6°F. Record-shattering heat in the Pacific Northwest was linked to hundreds of deaths in 2021, and more than 1,000 people died in Western Europe last summer of heat-related causes.

Ward said public health and safety authorities should begin organizing educational campaigns to "help individuals understand how they can mitigate heat" and to examine how they can help people procure fans and other cooling devices.

"Additional measures could include... providing shelter for the unhoused during periods of extreme heat," said Ward, "and reinforcing heat safety guidelines for occupational exposure and student-athletes."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Julia Conley.

They said evacuees arrived from the nearby villages of Pyin Sa Lu, Sa Lu Seik and Kwin Pauk and have been put up in monasteries and friends’ homes.

One local social assistance group official, who didn’t want to be named for security reasons, told RFA that although monasteries have been providing food it is not enough.

“There are places where cyclone evacuees gather to get food [but] there are 400 to 500 evacuees in each monastery or monastic school,” the official said.

RFA called the junta spokesperson and social affairs minister for Ayeyarwady region, Maung Maung Than, to ask what was being done to feed and house evacuees and minimize casualties if the cyclone is severe but no one answered.

Junta Deputy Information Minister Major Gen. Zaw Min Tun told regime-controlled newspapers Monday that 118 disaster shelters have been built in Ayeyarwady region and 17 more were under construction.

He said relief materials had been arranged for 6,000 people in six townships in the region.

According to a report by Myanmar’s Department of Meteorology at 7 a.m. local time Wednesday, a Depression in the Bay of Bengal was likely to turn into a Very Severe Cyclonic Storm by Friday morning.

The department forecast the storm would make landfall at Cox’s Bazar in Bangladesh, Kyaukpyu in Myanmar’s western Rakhine state and the northern Rakhine coast.

It warned people to beware of strong winds, heavy rain, flash floods and landslides and issued a warning to flights and shipping near the Myanmar coast.

A tropical cyclone is a rapidly rotating storm which has a diameter of between 200 and 1,000 kilometers (124 to 621 miles) and brings violent winds, torrential rains and high waves.

Cyclones are named by the U.N. World Meteorological Organization in order to avoid confusion when there is more than one in the same region simultaneously. If winds reach a certain speed, this storm will be named Cyclone Mocha after a port city in Yemen.

Myanmar has been hit hard by severe weather conditions in the past. More than 138,000 people died when Cyclone Nargis hit the country in May 2008. 

It was the world’s third most deadly meteorological disaster of its time according to the WMO Atlas of Mortality and Economic Losses from Weather, Climate and Water Extremes (1970-2019).

About 80,000 people died in Labutta township alone, according to local authorities.

Translated by RFA Burmese. Edited by Mike Firn.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By RFA Burmese.

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One year ago, all 50 states and the District of Columbia announced a $141 million settlement with Intuit, the maker of TurboTax. The investigation, led by New York Attorney General Letitia James, centered on how the company had steered customers into paying for tax preparation even though they qualified for a free government program. The attorney general said the probe was sparked by ProPublica’s reporting in 2019.

About 4.4 million low-income Americans will receive payments under the agreement. On Thursday, James announced that the process of actually mailing checks to all those people will begin next week.

“TurboTax’s predatory and deceptive marketing cheated millions of low-income Americans who were trying to fulfill their legal duties to file their taxes,” she said. “Today we are righting that wrong and putting money back into the pockets of hardworking taxpayers who should have never paid to file their taxes.”

The payments range from $29 to $85, depending on how many years each eligible consumer used TurboTax. (A number of people cited in ProPublica’s articles said they had paid over $100 for what they had thought would be free services.) The agreement covered 2016 through 2018. Those eligible for payments will be contacted by email and will not need to file a claim.

Intuit did not admit wrongdoing in the settlement.

As ProPublica documented in story after story, TurboTax for years lured consumers with the promise of “free” tax filing and then deployed a range of tricks and traps to steer them to paying products.

Meanwhile, Intuit has lobbied for decades to prevent the government from developing a free tax filing system. One result of that fight, 20 years ago, was the IRS Free File program: In exchange for the IRS agreeing not to develop a free filing system, the tax prep industry agreed to offer something similar. On paper, the program allowed 70% of taxpayers to file for free. But only a tiny percentage of people ever used Free File — in part because Intuit, H&R Block and others actively sought to prevent taxpayers from finding out about it while pushing their own “free” products.

After ProPublica’s articles in 2019, the situation shifted. The IRS and the tax prep companies dropped the provision that prevented the IRS from making its own free filing system. H&R Block and TurboTax dropped out of the Free File program. And the IRS is actively studying how a public free filing program might work.

In addition to the investigation by the state attorneys general, the Federal Trade Commission also sued Intuit, claiming the company deceived consumers with its “free” marketing. Intuit defended the accuracy of its ads but said it voluntarily ceased broadcasting its “free, free, free” TV ads in a “spirit of cooperation.” That case is ongoing.

This content originally appeared on Articles and Investigations - ProPublica and was authored by by Paul Kiel.

The People's Liberation Army's newly amended recruitment guidelines, which took effect from May 1, says conscription should "focus on preparations for war," and on recruiting highly skilled personnel, including former soldiers.

Former People's Liberation Army Lt. Col. Yao Cheng said Beijing needs more recruits capable of operating high-tech weaponry, and is hoping to re-enlist former military personnel to cut training time and costs.

"Veterans will be allowed to return to combat positions if they re-enlist," U.S.-based Yao said in an interview with Radio Free Asia. "This is a radical and effective measure, particularly for the navy, air force, rocket corps and other special units."

President Xi Jinping has repeatedly threatened to invade Taiwan, which has never been ruled by Beijing and whose 23 million people have no wish to give up their democratic way of life.

The amended rules require the recruitment of "high-quality soldiers" in a "lawful, precise and efficient manner."

There is scope for wider mobilization of the population in the event of war, including the recruitment of women to active service if numbers require it, as well as previously demobilized soldiers, who may return to their old posts and rank "if they meet the requirements."

There is also provision for qualified recruits to join as sergeants, the rules say.

"During wartime, the State Council and the Central Military Commission may adjust the requirements and methods used to enlist citizens to active service," according to Article 64 of the rules as published by state news agency Xinhua.

2 million strong

The rules seem aimed at attracting reservists with previous training and experience, as well as fresh graduates, to join the People's Liberation Army's existing 2 million active personnel, said Kung Hsiang-sheng, associate researcher at Taiwan's Institute for National Defense and Security Research.

He said war in the Taiwan Strait, which could follow if Beijing tries to annex the democratic island, wouldn't just be fought against the island's armed forces.

"If there's a war in the Taiwan Strait, Taiwan isn't the only enemy they are thinking about," Kung said. "They include the United States and Japan, South Korea and any other allies that could join in."

"They will also need some troops to maintain [domestic] stability," Kung said.

According to Yao, the 1 million-strong People's Armed Police adds to China's current standing army, while there are some 8 million professional reserves under the age of 45 who have already served.

Adding a potential reservoir of 10 million students and regional reserves, national mobilization could produce an army of around 30 million in varying states of training and readiness, with some 10 million ready for combat in a relatively short time, he said.

"A war in the Taiwan Strait would mostly involve the navy, air force, rocket corps and involve high-tech combat," Yao said. "But Taiwan is so small, so it wouldn't need that many soldiers."

"The Central Military Commission has determined that 500,000 troops would be enough from across all of the services including the marines," he said.

No stomach for war

But he said many in the People's Liberation Army don't want to fight.

"People in China are generally anti-war and are unwilling to fight," Yao said. "I personally think that no one is going to give their all for the Communist Party. They are mostly waiting and watching."

He said there is scant esprit de corps in the People's Liberation Army, where the lower ranks are subjected to constant brainwashing, while the officers are typically motivated by the desire for promotion rather than for victory.

According to Yao, this is in stark contrast to democratic Taiwan, where ordinary citizens are likely to be highly motivated to defend their way of life from invasion and suppression by the Chinese Communist Party.

"The generals don't believe that they can win a war in the Taiwan Strait, and are unwilling to fight one," he said, drawing parallels with the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

His comments came after an anti-war post circulated widely on Chinese social media last month, in which the writer vowed not to take part in any invasion of Taiwan.

"I won't go, and I won't let my children go, either," the post said. "I am at the lowest level of society ... where nobody remembers us when we're in trouble – they only think of us when they're in trouble."

The post garnered more than 3.27 million views and more than 10,000 comments, according to a report by Taiwan's Central News Agency.

"Anyone starting a war or advocating for war is a national criminal," read one comment on the article, while another said: "If it's about fighting so the rich can hold onto their assets, then forget it!"

Another commented: "Why should I let them cut me down like a leek, shed my blood and my life for these high-ranking officials, whose wives and kids have all left for the United States?"

"Send the children of top officials -- they all have good, red genes," quipped another, while one comment said: "I will be first in line to fight for the enemy."

Translated by Luisetta Mudie. Edited by Malcolm Foster.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Hsia Hsiao-hwa for RFA Mandarin.

Former German Chancellor Angela Merkel said in an interview with Die Zeit, published on December 7, that “the 2014 Minsk agreement was an attempt to give time to Ukraine. It…used this time to become stronger as can be seen today. The Ukraine of 2014-2015 is not the modern Ukraine.”

These comments echoed those of Petro Poroshenko, the former president of Ukraine, who came to power in snap elections after the 2014 coup d’état. Regarding his signing of the Minsk Accord, Poroshenko repeated in a Deutsche Welle interview last June his previous admission: “Our goal was to, first, stop the threat, or at least to delay the war—to secure eight years to restore economic growth and create powerful armed forces.”

Meaning that Ukraine had no real intention of following the accords, but wanted to buy time while Ukraine built fortifications and developed a military strong enough to wage a war of aggression against the Russian-tilted Donetsk and Luhansk regions, which had demanded autonomy from the Ukrainian government installed in the February 2014 coup.

Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych (2010-2014) became a target for regime change when he spurned an International Monetary Fund (IMF) loan and instead drew his country closer to Russia.

When protesters backed by the U.S. did not have enough signatures for Yanukovych’s impeachment, they overthrew his government by force and hunted down Yanukovych’s supporters. The new Ukrainian government further tried to impose draconian language laws and attacked the people of eastern Ukraine after they voted for their autonomy after the coup—an attack that began right after then-CIA director John Brennan visited Ukraine.¹

Signed originally on September 5, 2014, by Ukraine, Russia, rebel leaders in eastern Ukraine and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), with mediation by leaders in France and Germany, the Minsk agreement had followed a twelve-point protocol advocating for a cease-fire in the fighting between the Ukrainian military and Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics and to decentralize power, giving those Republics autonomy which they had voted for in popular referenda.

Additional provisions included the withdrawal of illegal armed groups and mercenaries from Ukraine, the release of hostages and illegally detained persons, the establishment of security zones and independent monitoring of the conflict zones, prosecution and punishment of war criminals, and continuance of inclusive national dialogue.

Unfortunately, the Minsk protocol was never followed, and conflict in eastern Ukraine persisted, leading to the signing of the Minsk II protocol in February 2015.

This protocol reaffirmed many aspects of the first Minsk agreement, including the promotion of decentralization and autonomy for the Donetsk and Luhansk Republics, which was to be enshrined in a new Ukrainian constitution that was to recognize the diversity of religions, languages and cultures within Ukraine.²

The Ukrainian right sector, however, vowed not to follow Minsk II, claiming that it was unconstitutional and the U.S. State Department accused Russian President Vladimir Putin of violating the protocol by deploying Russian Armed Forces around the contested city of Debaltseve to assist the Donetsk Army. (Putin’s spokesman denied this and said that Russia could not assist in the implementation of Minsk II because it was not involved in the conflict.)

When a law was passed in the Ukrainian parliament granting Donetsk and Luhansk partial autonomy, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said that the “law was a sharp departure from the Minsk agreements because it demanded local elections under Ukrainian jurisdiction.”

Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said that Angela Merkel’s comments on December 7 were nothing short of the testimony of a person who openly admitted that everything done between 2014 and 2015 was meant to “distract the international community from real issues, play for time, pump up the Kyiv regime with weapons, and escalate the issue into a large-scale conflict.”

Merkel’s statements “horrifyingly” reveal in turn that the West uses “forgery as a method of action,” and resorts to “machinations, manipulation, and all kinds of distortions of truth, law, and rights imaginable.”

Loss of Trust

Russian President Vladimir Putin for his part told journalists at a Eurasian Union Summit in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, on December 10³ that he had thought the leader of the Federal Republic of Germany, even though Germany was on Ukraine’s side, had been sincere in negotiating the Minsk agreements, but now it was apparent that “they were deceiving us. The only purpose was to pump arms into Ukraine and get it ready for hostilities. We are seeing this, yes. Apparently, we got our bearings too late, frankly. Perhaps we should have started all this sooner, but we still simply hoped to come to terms under these Minsk peace agreements.”

For Putin, Merkel’s admission shows that “we did everything right by starting the special military operation. Why? Because it transpired that nobody was going to fulfill these Minsk agreements. The Ukrainian leaders also mentioned this, in the words of former President Poroshenko, who said he signed the agreements but was not going to fulfill them.”

According to Putin, now the issue of “trust is at stake. Trust as such is already close to zero, but after such statements, the issue of trust is coming to the fore. How can we negotiate anything? What can we agree upon? Is it possible to come to terms with anyone, and where are the guarantees? This is, of course, a problem. But eventually we will have to come to terms all the same. I have already said many times that we are ready for these agreements, we are open. But, naturally, all this makes us wonder with whom we are dealing.”

Fitting a Larger Pattern of Deception

Western treachery over the Minsk agreements is far from a historical anomaly.

Following the end of the Cold War, the George H. W. Bush administration promised Mikhail Gorbachev that NATO would not be expanded one inch eastward in exchange for Russia accepting the reunification of Germany and removing troops it had stationed in East Germany.

But in 1998, the Clinton administration certified NATO expansion into Romania, Poland and Hungary, triggering a new Cold War.

Decades earlier, the United States had deceived the Soviets by failing to abide by the Yalta agreements when it covertly armed neo-Nazis to try to foment counter-revolutions in pro-communist governments that were being established in Eastern Europe.

When the U.S. invaded Russia with six other countries in 1918 following the Bolshevik Revolution, President Woodrow Wilson deceived his own commanding General, William S. Graves, who was told that he was going to Russia to protect the Trans-Siberian Railway and a Czech military delegation when his real purpose was to support Czarist military officers intent on re-establishing the old order in Russia.⁴

How the West Brought War to Ukraine

Benjamin Abelow’s new book, How the West Brought War to Ukraine: Understanding How U.S. and NATO Policies Led to Crisis, War, and the Risk of Nuclear Catastrophe (Great Barrington, MA: Siland Press, 2022), demonstrates that the official U.S. narrative about the war in Ukraine is not only wrong but “the opposite of truth.”

A lecturer in medicine at Yale University with a degree in European history who lobbied Congress on nuclear weapons policy, Abelow writes that “the underlying cause of the war lies not in an unbridled expansionism of Mr. Putin, or in paranoid delusions of military planners in the Kremlin, but in a 30-year history of Western provocations, directed at Russia, that began during the dissolution of the Soviet Union and continued to the start of the war.”⁵

The key U.S./Western provocations detailed by Abelow are:

1. The expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), a hostile anti-Russian military alliance, over a thousand miles eastward, pressing it toward Russia’s borders in disregard of assurances previously given to Moscow.
2. Withdrawal from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and the placing of anti-ballistic launch systems that could accommodate and fire offensive nuclear weapons such as nuclear-tipped Tomahawk cruise missiles at Russia, from newly joined NATO countries.
3. The Obama administration’s laying the groundwork for and possibly directly instigating an armed, far-right coup in Ukraine, which replaced a democratically elected pro-Russian government with an unelected pro-Western one that had four high-ranking members who could be labeled neo-fascist.
4. The conducting of countless NATO military exercises near Russia’s border, including ones with live-fire rocket exercises whose goal was to simulate attacks on air-defense systems inside Russia.
5. The assertion that Ukraine would become a NATO member.
6. Withdrawal by the U.S. from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, increasing Russia’s vulnerability to a U.S. first strike.
7. The U.S.’s arming and training of the Ukrainian military through bilateral agreements and holding of regular joint military training exercises inside Ukraine.
8. Leading the Ukrainian leadership to adopt an uncompromising stance toward Russia, further exacerbating the threat to Russia.⁶

Abelow makes clear that, if the situation were reversed and Russia or China carried out equivalent steps near U.S. territory, the U.S. would surely respond with a preemptive military attack on the aggressors that would be justified as a ‘matter of self-defense.’

So why should Russia be maligned when it is acting as any country would under similar circumstances? And why is it so hard for Americans to stand against their government’s reckless, deceitful and criminal policies that have greatly heightened the risk of nuclear war?

Originally published at CovertAction Magazine.

1. Kees van der Pijl, Flight MH17: Ukraine and the new Cold War: Prism of Disaster (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018), 103.
2. Russian expert Nicolai Petro noted at the time that there was one major omission to Minsk II—an end to anti-terrorist operations against the East, which would not have passed the Kyiv parliament. Van der Pijl, Flight MH17, 146.
3. At this summit, Putin and Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko presented proposals to strengthen the Eurasian Economic Union consisting of Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Russia, including by promoting development of modern industries and subsidizing interest rates on loans for industrial projects. Lukashenko stated: “We need to improve, at all costs, the blood circulatory system of our union…. It is already clear to everyone that the era of dollar dominance is coming to an end. The future belongs to trade blocs, which will be made in national currencies. Belarus and Russia are no longer using the U.S. dollar in their main settlements. It is important that other partners actively join this process.”
4. Years after Graves came back to the U.S., he wrote a scathing memoir, America’s Siberian Adventure, 1918-1920 (Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith Publishers Inc., 1931) and was accused in turn of being a communist sympathizer.
5. Benjamin Abelow, How the West Brought War to Ukraine: Understanding How U.S. and NATO Policies Led to Crisis, War, and the Risk of Nuclear Catastrophe (Great Barrington, MA: Siland Press, 2022), 7.
6. Abelow should add that the ultimate goal of U.S. policy is to trap Russia into a quagmire and bankrupt the country by ratcheting up sanctions, resulting in the growth of civil unrest and overthrow of Vladimir Putin, who is hated because he restored Russia’s economic sovereignty following the misrule of Boris Yeltsin in the 1990s and tightened Russian economic integration with Germany, threatening to undermine Anglo-American dominance in Central and Eastern Europe. See Jeremy Kuzmarov, “Repeating ’70s Strategy of Grand Chess-Master Brzezinski: Biden Appears to Have Induced Russian Invasion of Ukraine to Bankrupt Russia’s Economy and Advance Regime Change,” CovertAction Magazine, March 1, 2022; Van der Pijl, Flight MH17, Ukraine and the New Cold War, 3.

The post Former German Chancellor Merkel Admits that Minsk Peace Agreements Were Part of Scheme for Ukraine to Buy Time to Prepare for War with Russia first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Jeremy Kuzmarov.

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]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2022/10/03/ukrainians-prepare-for-possible-russian-nuclear-attack-with-iodine-tablets-and-humor/feed/ 0 338162 https://www.radiofree.org/2022/09/30/pennsylvania-lawmakers-prepare-to-impeach-larry-krasner/ https://www.radiofree.org/2022/09/30/pennsylvania-lawmakers-prepare-to-impeach-larry-krasner/#respond Fri, 30 Sep 2022 22:29:19 +0000 https://theintercept.com/?p=409373

The same Republicans in far-flung parts of the state have repeatedly decried gun violence in Philadelphia while voting to gut gun control bills in the General Assembly.

“This is a very slippery slope to impeach.”

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Akela Lacy.

As Hurricane Ian is set to strengthen into a Category 4 or 5 storm and make landfall Wednesday afternoon south of Tampa Bay, the storm already knocked out power in Cuba and killed at least two people Tuesday. Communities across Central Florida are preparing for a “very strong storm,” says Seán Kinane, news and public affairs director at Tampa community radio station WMNF, and many acknowledge the strength of the hurricane is “definitely impacted by climate disruption.”

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

The post Trench Warfare in California Hospitals: Kaiser Clinicians Prepare to Strike  appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Cal Winslow.

That’s according to Crisis Coordinator for Ukraine, Amin Awad, speaking exclusively to UN News, marking the 100 days since the 24 February Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Abdelmonem Makki, began by asking Mr. Awad if he thought the fighting could end anytime soon.

This content originally appeared on UN News and was authored by Abdelmonem Makki, UN News Arabic service.

A prime example is Eritrea, whose gross public debt is projected to exceed 160 percent of its GDP this year, causing the African Development Bank Group to label the country “in debt distress.” This debt may sap funds away from much-needed measures to adapt to temperature increases above the global average, extreme drought, and famine conditions like those that are currently wreaking havoc on the Horn of Africa. 

Without urgent action, experts warn of a “doom loop” of deepening debt and deteriorating environmental conditions. A new report from the Climate and Community Project — a coalition of academics and policy experts working to advance climate justice — urges the United States and European countries to provide immediate relief through a program of “climate reparations,” including through large-scale debt cancellation and restructuring. Even though the least developed countries have only contributed about 8 percent of the planet’s greenhouse gas emissions since 1850, they are poised to bear the brunt of climate change’s devastating impacts. 

According to the report, written by Georgetown University philosophy professor Olufemi Táíwò and the Climate and Community Project’s research director, Patrick Bigger, the developing world’s current debt crisis has its roots in colonialism and slavery. These practices funneled labor and resources away from the Global South — countries in Latin America, Asia, Africa, and Oceania — and gave the Global North a head start on economic development that left the rest of the world behind. As a result, Global South countries have had little choice but to borrow money in order to meet basic needs. This money — which may be provided in the form of interest-bearing loans or bonds — comes from governments like the United States, multilateral lenders like the World Bank or the International Monetary Fund, or private lenders, like a wealthy individual or company.

Borrowing money gives poor countries access to funds needed to avert an immediate disaster, such as famine, or to import enough oil to keep homes warm. But in the long term, these arrangements can straddle borrowers with a debt burden that shackles them to their creditors. 

The report’s top priority is for wealthy governments and multilateral organizations to cancel poor countries’ publicly held debt — a proposal that Táíwò and Bigger say is relatively simple and politically possible. According to their analysis, 19 of the world’s 20 most climate-vulnerable countries owe most of their debt to public or multilateral lenders that can easily choose to write off debts. Doing so could quickly free up fiscal space for the developing world to invest in climate adaptation and fossil fuel-free development — especially as many countries’ capacity to make those kinds of investments has been strained during the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2020, low- and middle-income countries’ public and private long-term debt swelled 12 percent to a record $860 billion, and some climate-vulnerable countries such as Jamaica and Cabo Verde saw their long-term debt-to-GDP ratio balloon to as much as 96 percent.

There have been efforts from the G20 — an intergovernmental forum of 19 wealthy countries and the European Union — to suspend some of this debt, but the Climate and Community Project report calls them “catastrophically insufficient,” arguing that they have not gone far enough and have sometimes included austerity stipulations — for example, requiring that countries cut public sector wages. 

A better policy, Táíwò and Bigger argue, should include the immediate cancellation of all publicly held debt with no strings attached, giving debtor countries the agency to choose how they might allocate their newly available resources. 

As a good example, the report points to the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries Initiative, an effort that began in 1996. The International Monetary Fund and a group of wealthy creditor countries eventually wrote off more than $70 billion of debt for 37 countries in the developing world, reducing their required debt repayments by 1.5 percent of GDP between 2001 and 2015. An independent analysis for the World Bank found that the write-offs allowed 28 of the participating countries — including Burkina Faso, Niger, and Ghana — to increase “poverty-reducing expenditures” from 6.4 percent of GDP in 1999 to 8.1 percent in 2004.

According to Bigger, this is a sign that debt cancellation works. “Every dollar spent servicing debt is a dollar not spent on other public policy priorities,” he said.

Canceling publicly held debt wouldn’t solve the entire problem, though, since private lenders hold a large and growing fraction of the developing world’s debt claims. As of 2020, private creditor-owed debt stood at an eye-watering $2.2 trillion, compared to just $792 billion owed to multilateral development banks like the World Bank. Because private lenders are often loath to participate in debt cancellation programs, many privately held debts would need to be acquired by sovereign and multilateral lenders in order to be written off. 

Bigger also noted that debt cancellation is less politically visible today than it was in the late 1990s, when a number of high-profile activist campaigns were centered around the Global South’s simmering debt crisis.

Some of today’s largest debt relief programs are spearheaded by big environmental nonprofits and involve conservation stipulations. The Nature Conservancy’s Blue Bonds for Conservation program, for example, helped negotiate a sovereign debt restructuring for Belize in 2020 that reduced the country’s total debt burden by $250 million and allowed it to repay its remaining debt at a lower interest rate — as long as the savings would be used to protect 30 percent of its ocean territory. A similar but larger effort was negotiated in 2016 for the Seychelles.

Lee Buchheit, a lawyer who has represented several countries in sovereign debt restructurings, including Belize, said this model allows countries to contribute to the “global conservation project” despite being in financial straits. While these programs are meant to ensure the savings are put to good use, some say that so-called “debt-for-nature” swaps can undermine a country’s agency to make their own choices about what they need.

“If an organization really takes seriously the idea that environmental decline is interwoven with global inequities … they might not want to put all their efforts in the basket of restructuring and look instead toward reparations,” said Jennifer Silver, an associate professor of geography at the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada.

In addition to debt cancellation, Táíwò and Bigger call for a rapid increase in climate finance from the Global North. Currently, rich countries have pledged to provide the developing world with $100 billion for climate projects annually, but they really only give about $80 billion. The Climate and Community Project report argues that the number should be closer to $1 trillion a year. It also calls for fines extracted from the fossil fuel industry in courtrooms around the world to be deposited in a trust fund that can be used by vulnerable communities in the Global South.

According to Bigger, these actions should be viewed not only as an opportunity for rich countries to redress previous harms, but to ensure that the developing world can pursue low-carbon and climate-resilient development, girding itself for a climate crisis it had little role in causing. “We need to think about the ramifications of how we decarbonize and what we owe to the rest of the world,” he said.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline How debt cancellation could help poor countries prepare for climate change on May 13, 2022.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Joseph Winters.

The post War Crimes Will Only Make Things Worse for Russia as Ukrainians Prepare for a Fight to the Bitter End appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Patrick Cockburn.

The post War Crimes Will Only Make Things Worse for Russia as Ukrainians Prepare for a Fight to the Bitter End appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Patrick Cockburn.

Anti-abortion bills are sweeping the U.S., with the Guttmacher Institute reporting that 82 restrictions have been introduced in 30 states in 2022 so far. On Wednesday, Idaho signed into law a six-week abortion ban, and lawmakers in Oklahoma passed a near-total ban on abortions — each modeled after a Texas “bounty hunter” law that allows private citizens to sue abortion providers. The U.S. Supreme Court is expected to rule on Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization later this year, in which a Mississippi abortion facility is challenging the state’s restrictive abortion law. If Ketanji Brown Jackson becomes the new justice, will it affect the court’s ruling? “Abortion rights don’t fall within that framework of constitutional rights that the Supreme Court feels that it has an obligation to uphold,” says Imani Gandy, senior editor of law and policy for Rewire News Group. “It is presumed that Roe is going to be reversed in a couple months,” says Dahlia Lithwick, senior editor and senior legal correspondent for Slate.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

“In recent years, so many communities around our nation have been damaged by storms and floods,” Vice President Kamala Harris said at a press conference in Sunset, Louisiana, on Monday, where she announced the new funding. “Our administration is committed to helping all communities to prepare for, to respond to, and to recover from extreme weather.”

The $60 million fund, called the Swift Current initiative, will be administered through FEMA’s Flood Mitigation Assistance Program and is part of $3.5 billion allocated for flood mitigation assistance grants by the bipartisan infrastructure law signed by President Joe Biden last fall. It’s the first FEMA project to get funded by the bill. 

The president had originally hoped Congress would be approving another, bigger bill with a lot more money in it for emissions reduction and climate adaptation efforts. But the Build Back Better Act and its $555 billion in climate spending are currently stalled in the Senate. So the Biden administration is using the few tools available to deliver on its promise to advance environmental justice and climate action at the federal level. 

FEMA’s new tranche of money for flood-prone homes is evidence of that. Individuals in the four states chosen by FEMA who own homes and properties that are insured by the National Flood Insurance Program and were substantially damaged by Hurricane Ida or have repeatedly flooded will be eligible for the money. FEMA will prioritize homes that are worth less than $750,000 so that the funding can be stretched between many properties. The grant funding, which will be distributed by local governments, can go toward one of five flood mitigation categories, including elevating buildings off the ground, retrofitting them, and making them more resilient to water.

The funding can also go toward a sixth category: “property acquisition and structure demolition/relocation.” In non-agency speak, that means the federal government will either pay homeowners for their land and tear down the house built on it or pay to have the house moved. As storms become more intense and seas rise, parts of the coastline in the U.S. will become so inundated by water that living there will become impossible. That means people will have to move, or retreat, from these areas. 

The Swift Current initiative is both an acknowledgment that retreat is a reality for some people and evidence that the federal government isn’t ready to incentivize or mandate retreat from flood-prone areas. It’s up to towns to decide what kind of projects they want to submit for grant money, so there’s no saying how many individual homes will end up receiving buyouts thanks to this program. “A lot will depend on which communities come in for funding,” Anna Weber, a policy analyst at the Natural Resources Defense Council, told Grist. “If it’s a town where the local government is really interested in buyouts and a lot of residents think it’s the right choice, then you could see that happen.” 

Swift Current will be administered in a way that complements the Biden administration’s effort to direct 40 percent of the benefits of its climate and environment programs toward disadvantaged neighborhoods, FEMA told CNN, by shouldering 90 percent of the cost share of rebuilding “substantially damaged” homes in “socially vulnerable” communities. A substantially damaged home is one where the cost of restoring the structure to its pre-disaster condition would equal or exceed 50 percent of the market value of the house. The agency typically takes on 75 percent of the cost of substantially damaged homes, but the remaining 25 percent can still be prohibitively expensive for many homeowners. For properties that have flooded more than twice, FEMA said it will cover between 90 and 100 percent of the cost of rebuilding, depending on the severity of the flooding. 

“The Swift Current initiative represents FEMA’s commitment to quickly and equitably getting hazard mitigation funding to the communities who need it the most,” FEMA Administrator Deanne Criswell said in a statement. 

While it’s a good start, the $60 million isn’t enough funding to match the scale of the flooding crisis in the U.S. Extreme flooding fueled by climate change already costs the U.S. roughly $32 billion a year. A recent study showed that, by 2050, that financial burden could rise 26 percent to $41 billion a year, and a majority of that risk will fall on predominantly Black communities. “Sixty million dollars is nowhere near enough to make a dent even in addressing the most flood-prone properties in the nation,” Weber said. “But in the bigger picture, this is a situation where FEMA is trying out something new, so it makes sense that they’re only looking at a limited pool of funding.” Depending on how Swift Current goes, FEMA says it could make similar funding available to more states. And the agency provides more money for flood mitigation in states via other streams of funding every year. 

However, in some places, no amount of federal funding will be able to stave off flooding brought on by rising sea-levels. Eventually, people in those areas will have to leave their homes. That’s a problem that FEMA can’t tackle alone. Managed retreat, the coordinated movement of people, assets, and infrastructure from coastlines further inland, will require stronger leadership and a holistic, all-of-government approach, Weber said. “Managed retreat isn’t the jurisdiction of any single federal agency or person,” she added. “I think that we’re going to need a lot more coordination and collaboration if we’re going to have something that actually addresses communities’ needs.” 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline FEMA is giving homeowners money to prepare for floods — or move away on Mar 23, 2022.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Zoya Teirstein.

The directors of Shell are being sued for failing to properly prepare the multinational oil and gas company for net zero.

In what is thought to be a first-of-its-kind action, the lawsuit brought by activist shareholders claims that Shell’s 13 directors are personally liable for failing to devise a strategy in line with the Paris Agreement, which aims to limit global heating to below 2 degrees Celsius by slashing fossil fuel emissions.

The lawsuit claims the failure puts the directors in breach of their duties under the United Kingdom’s Companies Act.

If successful, Shell’s board could be forced by the courts to change its strategy, taking specific concrete steps to align its plan with the Paris deal. But if the claimants lose, they could be liable for the full costs of the case, including directors’ legal fees.

ClientEarth, the environmental law organization taking the action against Shell, said it was calling for other shareholders to join.

At Shell’s 2021 annual general meeting, more than 30 percent of shareholders voted against the board in support of a resolution calling for Paris-aligned emissions targets.

But other shareholders may be reluctant to join after Shell announced in February an increase in dividends and a plan to buy back shares — increasing the value of those remaining in investors’ hands — after reporting a staggering $19 billion in profit.

ClientEarth has said it is taking the action against Shell in the company’s best interests. Their claim says the board has failed to properly account for the risks climate change poses to the company. Under the Companies Act, directors are legally bound to act in a way that promotes the company’s success and to exercise reasonable care, skill, and diligence.

Paul Benson, a ClientEarth lawyer, said: “It’s the first of its kind, this case. It’s the first time that anyone has sought to hold the board accountable for failing to properly prepare for the net zero transition.”

“It is highly novel, we’re in uncharted territory here but we see real merit with this claim. We think, frankly, the longer the board delays with this the more likely it is that the company is going to have to execute this sort of handbrake turn to retain commercial competitiveness, to meet the challenges of inevitable regulatory developments.”

It will not be the first time Shell has faced action over emissions. In May 2021, a Dutch court ruled the company must reduce its emissions — including those from the fuel it sells — by 45 percent by the end of 2030.

But Shell’s directors have appealed against that verdict and published an “energy transition strategy” outlining the company’s aim to reach net zero by 2050 — a transition it describes as “in step with society.” ClientEarth’s lawyers say the strategy does not meet the targets scientists say are critical to avoid catastrophic climate change.

“We say in our claim that Shell’s board is mismanaging the material and foreseeable climate risk facing the company,” Benson said.

“Shell is actually really quite exposed to the risks of climate change those are physical risks and transitional risks. They are exposed to what we call stranded asset risk, where their assets — for example their facilities, their physical infrastructure — the value of that is just going to reduce or it will become a liability as the net zero transition progresses.

“And they are exposed to massive write-downs of those assets.”

A Shell spokesperson said: “To be a net-zero emissions business by 2050, we are delivering on our global strategy that supports the Paris agreement. This includes the industry-leading target we have set to halve emissions from our global operations by 2030, and transforming our business to provide more low-carbon energy for customers.

“Addressing a challenge as big as climate change requires action from all quarters. The energy supply challenges we are seeing underscore the need for effective, government-led, policies to address critical needs such as energy security while decarbonizing our energy system. These challenges cannot be solved by litigation.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Shell directors sued for ‘failing to prepare company for net zero’ on Mar 21, 2022.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Damien Gayle.

"It's clear that voters are tired of corporate-backed politicians like Henry Cuellar who don't work for them."

"We'll be focused on talking to South Texas voters about how Jessica is going to fight for healthcare for all, create good-paying union jobs, and a humane immigration system."

That's what Leah Greenberg, co-executive director of the Indivisible Project, said Wednesday after Jessica Cisneros forced a runoff election in Texas' 28th Congressional District. This is the second primary cycle in which Cisneros, a progressive, has challenged Cuellar, an anti-choice Democrat.

"They're excited for a new generation of progressive leaders who put people first," Greenberg said of voters. "Last cycle, Cuellar won this nomination outright, but now he is headed toward his first-ever runoff. The groundswell of support for Cisneros has him in the fight for his political life."

"Over the next three months, Rep. Cuellar will be mired in an FBI investigation and focused on defending his corporate backers," she continued. "We'll be focused on talking to South Texas voters about how Jessica is going to fight for healthcare for all, create good-paying union jobs, and a humane immigration system."

Greenberg added that "Indivisibles are ready to do the work to finally send Cuellar packing and show that even the most entrenched politicians and their wealthy donors are no match for people power organizing for progressive change."

The Sunrise Movement, which also endorsed Cisneros, was similarly determined after Tuesday's results.

"This election pit people power against corporate money, and today we are one step closer to victory because young people mobilized. We already made nearly one million voter contact attempts in this district, and this has reinvigorated our movement. We're just getting started," said Varshini Prakash, Sunrise's executive director, in a statement.

"Young people have never felt more excited to elect a Green New Deal champion, especially when it means kicking out a corrupt, anti-choice, corporate Democrat who just last year blocked the package of Build Back Better," Prakash declared. "To the other corporate Democrats like Henry Cuellar, who continued to take fossil fuel money despite the ever-worsening, deeply felt climate crisis in Texas, just know that when you sell out your community to oil and gas executives, we'll come for you."

Calling the youth-led movement "a force to be reckoned with," Cisneros said Wednesday that she was inspired by the members' "persistent, fearless organizing" and vowed that she is "ready to fight with Sunrise in Congress for a Green New Deal."

"This fight was about South Texans proving that our dreams could take on their corporate money and that a daughter of immigrants could bring working-class leadership back to the community that raised her," the candidate said of Tuesday's primary race.

"Today, we proved just how powerful our movement is and are ready to keep fighting for the future we deserve," she added. " Together, we will take control back from Big Oil, private prisons, and Wall Street, and put it back where it belongs: with the people."

Cisneros echoed that message in an email sent out Wednesday by the campaign of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), one of several powerful progressives to endorse the Texan.

Ocasio-Cortez even traveled to Texas last month to rally with Cisneros and Greg Casar, who on Tuesday won the Democratic primary for the state's newly created 35th District.

While race-watchers have called the Cuellar-Cisneros runoff, with no candidates expected to cross the 50% threshold, votes were still being counted as of press time. According to The New York Times, Cuellar led with 48.4%, compared to Cisneros at 46.9% and Tannya Benavides at 4.7%.

The election is scheduled for May 24. Cisneros told reporters in Texas that "on May 24, when I turn 29 years old, I expect to be the Democratic nominee for this district."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Jessica Corbett.