PETER KOENIG—Carbon credits are the most ludicrous deceitful banking invention of the last 50 years. How do they work? – A huge corporation in the Global North, instead of making the necessary investments to reduce their CO2 output, they buy “carbon credits” from a country in the Global South, where the pollution level is below a certain limit, so the northern corporation may continue postponing the CO2-reducing investments, and the country in the global south should theoretically invest the money they got from the “carbon credit” sale into alternative energy or otherwise environmentally friendly projects. It hardly ever happens.
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And while this is happening in the USA, plus monster fires and so forth, in Europe strange, some would say bizarre, natural events are beginning to happen with increasing frequency. Floods, for example, have become superfloods, as the case of Venice now demonstrates.
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NATYLIE BALDWIN—Arctic ice, receding at a record pace, revealed five new islands in the Russian far north this year that had been hidden under the ice sheets for all of recorded human history. Russian scientists aboard a research ship near the northern coast of Siberia last week were amazed to discover a massive eruption of methane bubbles from the ocean floor. The huge clouds of the super-greenhouse gas suggest that the underlying permafrost is melting faster than anyone could have anticipated.
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LEE CAMP—“Fossil fuel companies risked wasting more than two trillion dollars over the coming decade by pursuing coal, oil and gas projects that could be worthless in the face of international action on climate change and advances in renewables – in turn posing substantial threats to investor returns.” They have made a two trillion-dollar gamble that we will all keep using fossil fuels even as society collapses. So they don’t just have a dog in the race, they have a goddamn elephant riding on top of a T. rex riding on top of Mike Pompeo.
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ROB URIE—The irony that liberal critics of past totalitarian regimes are about to face is that unless immediate and far reaching action is taken to resolve the environmental crises now unfolding, liberal capitalism might end up being the most murderous force in human history. Since the 1960s the U.S has had enough nuclear weapons to end human life on the planet. Through its promotion and practice of industrial capitalism, the U.S. now has primary responsibility for its consequences.
