Hey! Good Evening!

This evening's music features The King of Zydeco Clifton Chenier. Enjoy!

"They need so much propaganda, censorship and organized trolling because without those things the public would realize that pouring billions of dollars into an unwinnable conflict that risks nuclear war and makes everyone poorer actually sucks and doesn’t benefit normal people."

-- Caitlyn Johnstone

News and Opinion

An Extremely Dangerous Moment in History When Even Talk of Diplomacy Is Off the Table

Ukraine has been wracked by shocking destruction and deadly violence since Russia invaded the country in February. Estimates of the death toll range from a confirmed minimum of 27,577 people, including 6,374 civilians, to over 150,000. The slaughter can only get more horrific as long as all sides, including the United States and its NATO allies, remain committed to war.

In the first weeks of the war, the United States and NATO countries sent weapons to Ukraine to try to prevent Russia from quickly defeating Ukraine’s armed forces and conducting a U.S.-style “regime change” in Kyiv. But since that goal was achieved, the only goals that President Zelenskyy and his Western allies have publicly proclaimed are to recover all of pre-2014 Ukraine and decisively defeat and weaken Russia.

These are aspirational goals at best, which require sacrificing hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, of Ukrainian lives, regardless of the outcome. Even worse, if they should come close to succeeding, they are likely to trigger a nuclear war, making this the all-time epitome of a “no-win predicament.”

At the end of May, President Biden responded to probing questions about the contradictions in his Ukraine policy from the New York Times Editorial Board, replying that the United States was sending weapons so that Ukraine “can fight on the battlefield and be in the strongest possible position at the negotiating table.”

But when Biden wrote that, Ukraine had no position at any negotiating table, thanks mainly to the conditions that Biden and NATO leaders attached to their support. In April, after Ukraine negotiated a15-point peace plan for a ceasefire, a Russian withdrawal and a peaceful future as a neutral country, the United States and United Kingdom refused to provide Ukraine with the security guarantees that were a critical part of the agreement.

As now disgraced British prime minister Boris Johnson told President Zelenskyy in Kyiv on April 9th, the “collective West” was “in it for the long run,” meaning a long war against Russia, but wanted no part in any agreement between Ukraine and Russia.

In May, Russian forces advanced through Donbas, forcing Zelenskyy to admit, by June 2nd, that Russia now controlled 20% of Ukraine’s pre-2014 territory, leaving Ukraine in a weaker, not a stronger position.

Six months after Secretary Austin declared in April that the new goal of the war was to decisively defeat and “weaken” Russia, President Biden is rejecting calls for a new peace initiative. So the United States and United Kingdom had no reservations about intervening to kill peace talks in April, but now that they’ve sold President Zelenskyy on fighting an endless war, Biden insists that he has no say in the matter if Zelenskyy rejects peace negotiations.

But it is axiomatic that wars end at the negotiating table, as Biden acknowledged to the Times. The perennial thorny question for war leaders is “When to negotiate?” The problem is that, when your side seems to be winning, you have little incentive to stop fighting. But when you appear to be losing, there is no incentive to negotiate from a weak position either, as long as you believe that the tide of war will sooner or later shift in your favor and improve your position. That was the hope on which Johnson and Biden convinced Zelenskyy to stake his country’s future in April.

Now Ukraine has launched localized counter-offensives and recovered parts of its territory. Russia has responded by throwing hundreds of thousands of fresh troops into the war and starting to systematically demolish Ukraine’s electricity grid.

The escalating crisis exposes the weakness of Biden’s position. He is gambling with hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian lives, which he has no moral claim over, that Ukraine will somehow be in a stronger military position after a winter of war and power outages, with hundreds of thousands more Russian troops in the areas Russia controls. This is a bet on a much longer war, in which U.S. taxpayers will shell out for thousands of tons of weapons and millions of Ukrainians will die, with no clear endgame short of nuclear war.

Thanks to the moral and intellectual bankruptcy of the U.S. mass media, most Americans have no inkling of the deceptive way that Biden and his bubble-headed British allies cornered Zelenskyy into a suicidal decision to abandon promising peace negotiations in favor of a long war that will destroy his country.

The horrors of the war, the contradictions in Western policy, the blowback on European energy supplies, the specter of famine stalking the Global South and the rising danger of nuclear war are provoking a worldwide chorus of voices urgently calling for peace in Ukraine.

If you’re on a media diet of the thin gruel that passes for news in America these days, you may not have heard the calls for peace from UN Secretary General Guterres, Pope Francis, or the leaders of 66 countries speaking at the UN General Assembly in September, representing the majority of the world’s population.    

But there are also Americans calling for peace. From across the political spectrum, from retired military officers and diplomats to journalists and academics, there are “adults in the room” who recognize the dangerous contradictions of U.S. policy on Ukraine, and are joining leaders from around the world in calling for diplomacy and peace.

Jack Matlock served as the last U.S. Ambassador to the Soviet Union, from 1987 to 1991, after a 35-year career as a Soviet specialist in the U.S. Foreign Service. Matlock was at the embassy in Moscow during the Cuban missile crisis, where he translated critical messages between Kennedy and Kruschev.

On October 17, 2022, in an article in Responsible Statecraft titled “Why the US must press for a ceasefire in Ukraine,” Ambassador Matlock wrote that as principal arms supplier to Ukraine and the sponsor of the most punitive sanctions on Russia, the United States “is obligated to help find a way out” of this crisis. The article concluded, “Until… the fighting stops, and serious negotiations get underway, the world is headed for an outcome where we all are losers.”

Another veteran U.S. diplomat who has spoken out for diplomacy over Ukraine is Rose Gottemoeller, the Deputy Secretary General of NATO from 2016 to 2019 after she served as President Obama’s senior adviser on arms control, disarmament and nonproliferation. Gottemoeller recently wrote in the Financial Times that she sees no military solution to the crisis in Ukraine, but that “discreet talks” could lead to the kind of “quiet bargain” that resolved the Cuban missile crisis 60 years ago.

On the military side, Admiral Mike Mullen was the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff from 2007 to 2011. After President Biden chatted at a fundraising party about the war in Ukraine leading to nuclear “Armageddon,” ABC interviewed Mullen about the danger of nuclear war. “I think we need to back off that a little bit and do everything we possibly can to get to the table to resolve this thing,” Mullen replied. “It’s got to end, and usually there are negotiations associated with that. The sooner the better as far as I’m concerned.”

Economist Jeffrey Sachs was the director of the Earth Institute and now the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University. He has been a consistent voice for peace in Ukraine ever since the invasion. In a recent article on September 26, titled “The Great Game in Ukraine is Spinning out of Control,” Sachs quoted President Kennedy in June 1963, uttering what Sachs called “the essential truth that can keep us alive today:”

“Above all, while defending our own vital interests, nuclear powers must avert those confrontations which bring an adversary to a choice of either a humiliating retreat or a nuclear war,” said JFK. “To adopt that kind of course in the nuclear age would be evidence only of the bankruptcy of our policy–or of a collective death-wish for the world.”

Sachs concluded, “It is urgent to return to the draft peace agreement between Russia and Ukraine of late March, based on the non-enlargement of NATO… The world’s very survival depends on prudence, diplomacy, and compromise by all sides.”

Even Henry Kissinger, whose own war crimes are well documented, has spoken out on the senselessness of current U.S. policy. Kissinger told the Wall Street Journal in August, “We are at the edge of war with Russia and China on issues which we partly created, without any concept of how this is going to end or what it’s supposed to lead to.”

In the U.S. Congress, after every single Democrat voted for a virtual blank check for arming Ukraine in May, with no provision for peacemaking, Congressional Progressive Caucus chairperson Pramila Jayapal and 29 other progressive Democratic Representatives recently signed a letter to President Biden, urging him to “make vigorous diplomatic efforts in support of a negotiated settlement and ceasefire, engage in direct talks with Russia, explore prospects for a new European security arrangement acceptable to all parties that will allow for a sovereign and independent Ukraine, and, in coordination with our Ukrainian partners, seek a rapid end to the conflict and reiterate this goal as America's chief priority.”

Unfortunately, the backlash within their own party was so blistering that within 24 hours they withdrew the letter. Siding with calls for peace and diplomacy from all over the world is still not an idea whose time has come in the halls of power in Washington DC.

This is an extremely dangerous moment in history. Americans are waking up to the reality that this war threatens us with the existential danger of nuclear war, a danger most Americans thought we had survived once and for all at the end of the First Cold War. Even if we manage to avoid nuclear war, the impact of a long, bloody war will destroy Ukraine and kill millions of Ukrainians, cause humanitarian catastrophes across the Global South, and trigger a long-lasting global economic crisis.

That will relegate all humanity’s urgent priorities, from tackling the climate crisis to hunger, poverty and disease, to the back-burner for the foreseeable future.

There is an alternative. We can and must resolve this conflict through peaceful diplomacy and negotiation, to end the killing and destruction and let the people of Ukraine live in peace.

MSNBC Host FLIPS OUT Over Possible Ukraine Negotiations

Putin's Valdai Speech, warns Western elites

White House Says Only Zelensky Gets to Determine When Negotiations Will Happen

The White House said Wednesday that it sees no prospects for negotiations between Russia and Ukraine and that it’s up to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to decide when talks will happen.

“Neither side is in a position to sit down and negotiate,” National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said, according to The New York Times. He said that “if and when it comes to the table,” Zelensky “gets to determine when that is; he gets to determine what success looks like, and he gets to determine what or what he is not willing to negotiate with the Russians.”

Kirby’s comments are the latest confirmation that the US has no interest in pursuing diplomacy with Russia despite President Biden’s recent warning that there is a greater risk of nuclear “armageddon” today than at any time since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis.

US Accelerates Plan to Deploy Upgraded Nukes to Europe

The US has accelerated plans to deploy an upgraded version of its primary nuclear gravity bomb to Europe amid heightened tensions with Russia over the potential use of nuclear weapons.

A cable obtained by Politico reveals that US officials told NATO allies in Brussels this month that they will send an upgraded version of the B61-12 air-dropped gravity bomb to Europe by December. The upgraded bomb was originally set to arrive in Europe next spring.

The plan involves replacing older weapons with upgraded bombs at US storage facilities in Europe. The US keeps about 100 nuclear warheads at air bases in Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, Italy, and Turkey.

The upgrade to the B61-12 replaces non-nuclear components to make it more accurate. The upgrade is also designed so it can be carried by all US and allied bombers and fighter jets, unlike older versions of the bomb.

How The U.S. Learned To Love Neo-N@zis In Ukraine

The Guardian (propaganda mill) on Biden's NPR.

Biden to scrap Trump missile project but critics attack US ‘nuclear overkill’

The Biden administration has confirmed it will cancel a submarine-launched nuclear cruise missile programme begun by Donald Trump, as part of its review of nuclear policy. The administration will also retire a gravity bomb, the B83-1, from its arsenal as part of its Nuclear Posture Review (NPR), but arms control advocates argued the changes from the Trump era did not go far enough.

The administration is retaining another weapon variant introduced by Trump, a low-yield warhead called the W76-2, intended to deter an adversary like Russia using a low-yield weapon. The Democratic party manifesto in 2020 had called the W76-2 “unnecessary, wasteful, and indefensible”.

The Biden NPR said that the “fundamental role of nuclear weapons is to deter nuclear attack on the United States, our allies, and partners”. That declaratory policy stops sort of saying deterring nuclear attack is the sole purpose of the arsenal, which is what Biden promised in his election campaign. Instead, the NPR says that the US could strike back against “a narrow range of other high consequence, strategic-level attacks”. ...

In response to the NPR, Jessica Sleight, partner for policy at Global Zero, a disarmament advocacy group, said: “Contrary to President Biden’s stated intentions to reduce the role of nuclear weapons, this Nuclear Posture Review continues decades of nuclear overkill, doubles down on needless weapons programs, and fails to advance overdue reforms to policy and posture that would make the United States, its allies, and the world safer.”

Common Dreams' take on Biden's NPR:

'A Terrifying Document': Critics Say Biden Nuclear Policy Makes the World More Dangerous

Just weeks after U.S. President Joe Biden warned that Russia's assault on Ukraine has dramatically raised the risk of "Armageddon," his administration on Thursday released a Nuclear Posture Review that nonproliferation advocates say does nothing to pull the world back from the brink of global catastrophe.

While the formal statement of U.S. nuclear strategy pays lip service to the need to limit the spread and prevent the use of atomic weaponry and cancels an egregious Trump-era missile program, the document makes clear that the country will move ahead with dangerous and costly modernization plans—and leaves intact the option of a nuclear first strike.

"Allies must be confident that the United States is willing and able to deter the range of strategic threats they face, and mitigate the risks they will assume in a crisis or conflict," the document states. "Modernizing U.S. nuclear forces is key to assuring allies that the United States is committed and capable of deterring the range of threats U.S. nuclear strategy addresses."

The leading threats, according to the posture review, are Russia and China, which the Pentagon document characterizes as "major and growing" nuclear dangers to the U.S. and its allies.

The review makes clear that U.S. officials considered and rejected "no first use" and "sole purpose" policies that would bar the U.S. from launching a preemptive nuclear strike or using an atomic weapon in response to a non-nuclear attack. The document claims such policies "would result in an unacceptable level of risk."

That position conflicts with Biden's statement during the 2020 presidential campaign that "the sole purpose of the U.S. nuclear arsenal should be deterring—and, if necessary, retaliating against—a nuclear attack."

Stephen Young, senior Washington representative at the Union of Concerned Scientists, said the Biden administration's Nuclear Posture Review (NPR) is "a terrifying document" that "not only keeps the world on a path of increasing nuclear risk, in many ways it increases that risk."

"Citing rising threats from Russia and China," Young noted, "it argues that the only viable U.S. response is to rebuild the entire U.S. nuclear arsenal, maintain an array of dangerous Cold War-era nuclear policies, and threaten the first use of nuclear weapons in a variety of scenarios."

"Yes, the world is becoming a more dangerous place, but the only military threat to the survival of the United States is a nuclear war with Russia or China," he continued. "Rather than recognizing that threat and seeking to find ways to end it, the Biden NPR doubles down on nuclear deterrence and the status quo approach to security that says we all must be prepared to die in less than an hour."

Made public after months of delay, Biden's NPR comes as fears of nuclear conflict remain high after Russian President Vladimir Putin threatened last month to put his country's vast arsenal to use in Ukraine. In a new speech on Thursday, Putin said he has no intention of using nuclear weapons, declaring, "There is no point in that, neither political nor military."

A day earlier, Putin oversaw planned nuclear drills less than two weeks after NATO began its own rehearsal for atomic warfare that would threaten the survival of humanity.

Jessica Sleight, partner for policy at Global Zero—a movement that advocates the total elimination of nuclear weapons—said in a statement Thursday that "contrary to President Biden's stated intentions to reduce the role of nuclear weapons, this Nuclear Posture Review continues decades of nuclear overkill, doubles down on needless weapons programs, and fails to advance overdue reforms to policy and posture that would make the United States, its allies, and the world safer."

"The NPR was an opportunity for the United States to show real leadership to reject nuclear warfighting, reduce nuclear dangers, and begin moving toward a smaller, safer arsenal with a more stable posture," said Sleight. "Instead, we see Putin's imperialist ambitions and China's reported nuclear expansion have strengthened the hand of nuclear hawks who underestimate the growing risks of nuclear arms race instability and escalation."

European Oil Giants Report 'Obscene' Profits as Millions Face Deadly Energy Crisis

European oil giants Shell and Total reported massive profits Thursday as sky-high energy prices fuel a devastating cost-of-living crisis across the continent, with families struggling to afford heat and electricity as the winter months approach.

Shell, one of the biggest oil companies in the world, posted $9.5 billion in global third-quarter profits—more than double the $4.2 billion it reported during the same period last year. The United Kingdom-based corporation also announced plans to reward shareholders by buying back $4 billion worth of its stock and boosting its dividend by 15%.

The Financial Times reported that "despite lower average crude prices compared with the second quarter, Shell benefited from a strong operational performance from its deepwater oil assets, particularly in the U.S. Gulf of Mexico, resulting in the recovery of significant 'high-value barrels.'"

France-based TotalEnergies, meanwhile, reported $9.9 billion in profits, up $4.77 billion compared to the third quarter of 2021. The firm announced "a one-off salary bonus to staff to reflect its bumper profits," according to Reuters.

Banner earnings reports from Europe's two largest oil companies sparked fresh calls for a windfall profits tax that would return money to households being hammered by an energy cost spike stemming from Russia's war on Ukraine, which fossil fuel giants have exploited to raise prices and pad their bottom lines.

"The announcement of yet another obscene profit for Shell shows the scale of the pain that these companies are inflicting on the public," said Freya Aitchison, an oil and gas campaigner at Friends of the Earth Scotland. "While oil companies continue to make record-breaking profits, ordinary people are facing skyrocketing energy bills and millions are being pushed into fuel poverty."

On Twitter, Greenpeace U.K. asked, "How many more households need to be forced into fuel poverty before the government properly taxes oil and gas giants?"

During Thursday's earnings call, Shell executives said the company has thus far been able to avoid paying the U.K.'s existing windfall tax as its large investments in oil and gas development efforts in the country offset its profits there.

But Shell CEO Ben van Beurden told investors that "we should be prepared and accept that... our industry will be looked at for raising taxes in order to fund the transfers to those who need it most in these very difficult times."

Frances O'Grady, general secretary of the U.K. Trades Union Congress, said Shell's profit report is "obscene—especially at a time when millions are struggling with soaring bills."

"The government has run out of excuses," O'Grady added. "It must impose a higher windfall tax on oil and gas companies. The likes of Shell are treating families like cash machines." ...

Much of Europe is facing a cost-of-living crisis driven by high energy prices, which have sparked widespread anger and mass demonstrations against insufficient government action.

As the BBC pointed out Thursday, the U.K. government is "limiting gas and electricity bills through the Energy Price Guarantee scheme, but instead of lasting for two years as originally planned, it will now end in April."

"There have been warnings typical household gas and electric costs could reach more than £4,300 when support is scaled back," the outlet noted.

A recent survey found that millions of Britons have resorted to skipping meals to make ends meet.

Fuel poverty kills thousands of people each winter in the U.K., but anti-poverty campaigner Steve Burak wrote in a blog post for Greenpeace earlier this week that he has "never seen things get as bad as they are now."

"Skyrocketing energy bills are at the absolute heart of this cost-of-living crisis. With an estimated seven million households across Britain in fuel poverty this winter, the scale of this crisis is terrifying," Burak continued. "We are sleepwalking into a life-or-death winter for so many people, but the government refuses to listen to us."

"Instead," he added, "they listen to their own voices and the voices of major fossil fuel companies by protecting their obscene profits."

Fears Bolsonaro may not accept defeat as son cries fraud before Brazil election

Fears are growing that Jair Bolsonaro could refuse to accept defeat in Brazil’s crunch election this Sunday after his politician son claimed Brazil’s far-right president was the victim of “the greatest electoral fraud ever seen” amid unproven allegations of foul play.

The assertion from the president’s senator son, Flávio Bolsonaro, was almost identical to language used by Donald Trump – Bolsonaro’s most prominent international backer – after he lost the 2020 US election to Joe Biden. Many suspect Bolsonaro plans to follow a similar script if he loses to his leftist rival, the ex-president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who won the election’s first round on 2 October and currently leads the polls by a margin of between 4% and 5%.

Long-running fears that Bolsonaro – who has spent years attacking Brazil’s democratic system – might contest the result intensified on Monday after his communications minister, Fábio Faria, summoned journalists to denounce what he called “a grave violation of the electoral system”.

Without offering evidence, Faria claimed local radio stations in north-east Brazil had broadcast thousands more campaign adverts for the Lula campaign. “You need to get out and vote because we are being hamstrung,” he told supporters.

On Wednesday Brazil’s chief electoral justice, Alexandre de Moraes, rejected a petition from Bolsonaro’s campaign demanding the supposed irregularity be investigated. Moraes called instead for an investigation into whether the “unsubstantiated” claims were designed to “disrupt” the election. But Bolsonaro doubled down on the claims, telling reporters the electoral process had been “unbalanced” in Lula’s favour.

Brazilian presidential run-off unfolds under shadow of military’s “parallel vote count”

The Brazilian presidential run-off, due to take place on Sunday, October 30, is unfolding under the shadow of an unprecedented “parallel vote count” and “audit” of the country’s electronic voting machines being conducted by the country’s military. The armed forces command has essentially aligned itself with the false claims of ballot fraud used by fascistic President Jair Bolsonaro to justify his announced refusal to concede a likely defeat.

Bolsonaro has for four years claimed that only voting fraud in favor of his 2018 elections adversary, Fernando Haddad of the Workers Party (PT), blocked his victory in the first round. Since then, anticipating the results of the hatred generated by the sweeping attacks on workers’ living standards he implemented on behalf of national and foreign capital, Bolsonaro has relentlessly attacked the Brazilian electoral system and enlisted the military in these attacks.

In the last days before the run-off, after Bolsonaro trailed former PT president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in the first round by 6 million votes, the situation is more dangerous than ever. The military has remained silent on their “audit,” while Bolsonaro repeats his claims that he will not accept the results unless the military proclaims its agreement with them, despite having no constitutional role in the matter.

More gravely, when asked last week by both the Supreme Court and the Court of auditors to release its “report,” the Defense Ministry replied it would not make public any “partial” analysis before the full conclusion of its “audit,” and that this would only happen after January 5, that is, after the inauguration of the next president, set for January 1.

The entire course of the closed door negotiations between all those declaring Bolsonaro a “fascist” and an existential threat to Brazilian democracy, first and foremost the Congressional opposition led by Lula and the PT, has so far succeeded only in elevating the military to the role of final arbiter of the elections, whatever the results of Sunday’s run-off.

American Middle Class Housing Dream IS DEAD

US economy bounces back to growth despite surging inflation

The US economy grew at a 2.6% annual rate from July through September, snapping two straight quarters of economic contraction and overcoming punishingly high inflation and interest rates.

Thursday’s estimate from the commerce department showed that the nation’s gross domestic product – the broadest gauge of economic output – grew in the third quarter after having shrunk in the first half of 2022. Stronger exports and steady consumer spending, backed by a healthy job market, helped restore growth to the world’s biggest economy.

Still, the outlook for the economy has darkened. The Federal Reserve has aggressively raised interest rates five times this year to fight chronic inflation and is set to do so again next week and in December. ...

With inflation still near a 40-year high, steady price spikes have been pressuring households across the country. At the same time, rising interest rates have derailed the housing market and are likely to inflict broader damage over time. The outlook for the world economy, too, grows bleaker the longer that Russia’s war against Ukraine drags on.

Last quarter’s US economic growth reversed annual declines of 1.6% from January through March and 0.6% from April through June. Consecutive quarters of declining economic output are one informal definition of a recession. But most economists have said they believe the economy skirted a recession, noting the still-resilient job market and steady spending by consumers. Most of them have expressed concern, though, that a recession is likely next year as the Fed steadily tightens credit.

Americans die younger in states run by conservatives, study finds

Americans die younger in conservative states than in those governed by liberals, a new study has found. The authors wrote: “Simulations indicate that changing all policy domains in all states to a fully liberal orientation might have saved 171,030 lives in 2019, while changing them to a fully conservative orientation might have cost 217,635 lives.”

The study was published on Plos One, “an inclusive journal community working together to advance science for the benefit of society, now and in the future”.

They wrote: “Results show that the policy domains were associated with working-age mortality.” Bucking the trend, the study found that “more conservative marijuana policies” were associated with lower mortality rates.

But it also found that “more liberal policies on the environment, gun safety, labour, economic taxes and tobacco taxes in a state were associated with lower mortality in that state”. They added: “Especially strong associations were observed between certain domains and specific causes of death: between the gun safety domain and suicide mortality among men, between the labour domain and alcohol-induced mortality, and between both the economic tax and tobacco tax domains and CVD [cardiovascular] mortality.”

The study authors also noted that American life expectancy as a whole is lower than in most high-income countries, “fall[ing] between … Cuba and Albania”. They wrote: “The rise in working-age mortality rates in the US in recent decades largely reflects stalled declines in cardiovascular disease mortality alongside rising mortality from alcohol-induced causes, suicide and drug poisoning; and it has been especially severe in some US states. Building on recent work, this study examined whether US state policy contexts may be a central explanation.”

Ari Berman on "How Wisconsin Became the GOP’s Laboratory for Dismantling Democracy"

Ho Hum, catastrophe's on its way. Time to make more profits.

World close to ‘irreversible’ climate breakdown, warn major studies

The climate crisis has reached a “really bleak moment”, one of the world’s leading climate scientists has said, after a slew of major reports laid bare how close the planet is to catastrophe.

Collective action is needed by the world’s nations more now than at any point since the second world war to avoid climate tipping points, Prof Johan Rockström said, but geopolitical tensions are at a high. He said the world was coming “very, very close to irreversible changes … time is really running out very, very fast”.

Emissions must fall by about half by 2030 to meet the internationally agreed target of 1.5C of heating but are still rising, the reports showed – at a time when oil giants are making astronomical amounts of money. ...

All three of the key UN agencies have produced damning reports in the last two days. The UN environment agency’s report found there was “no credible pathway to 1.5C in place” and that “woefully inadequate” progress on cutting carbon emissions means the only way to limit the worst impacts of the climate crisis is a “rapid transformation of societies”.

Current pledges for action by 2030, even if delivered in full, would mean a rise in global heating of about 2.5C, a level that would condemn the world to catastrophic climate breakdown, according to the UN’s climate agency. Only a handful of countries have ramped up their plans in the last year, despite having promised to do so at the Cop26 UN climate summit in Glasgow last November.

‘Monstrous’ east African oil project will emit vast amounts of carbon, data shows

An oil pipeline under construction in east Africa will produce vast amounts of carbon dioxide, according to new analysis. The project will result in 379m tonnes of climate-heating pollution, according to an expert assessment, more than 25 times the combined annual emissions of Uganda and Tanzania, the host nations.

The East African crude oil pipeline (EACOP) will transport oil drilled in a biodiverse national park in Uganda more than 870 miles to a port in Tanzania for export. The main backers of the multibillion dollar project are the French oil company TotalEnergies and the China National Offshore Oil Corporation (CNOOC).

Environmental assessments by the EACOP consortium were approved by the host governments, but only the construction and operation of the pipeline were considered.

The new analysis, by the Climate Accountability Institute (CAI), found construction and operation contributed only 1.8% of the full emissions of the project when taking into account overseas transport, refining and burning of the 848m barrels of oil by end users. It considered the 25-year lifespan of the project and refining in Europe and China. In the years of peak oil flow, the associated emissions would be more than double those of Uganda and Tanzania in 2020.

Richard Heede, at CAI, said: “It is time for TotalEnergies to abandon the monstrous EACOP that promises to worsen the climate crisis, waste billions of dollars that could be used for good, bring mayhem to human settlements and wildlife along the pipeline’s path.” Heede described EACOP as a “mid-sized carbon bomb”.

Also of Interest

Here are some articles of interest, some which defied fair-use abstraction.

The endless proxy war, by design

The Boy Who Cried Hitler: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

US expands military presence near Russian border

Finland Willing to Host NATO Nuclear Weapons on Border With Russia

Progressives' Pathetic Ukraine Flip-Flop

War of words escalates between US and Saudi Arabia over Opec+ cut

Israel Attacks Syrian Capital for Third Time in a Week

Slouching Towards Reverse Colonialism

How UK Backed Panama Invasion

Price-Gouging Corporations Helping Drive Inflation Must Be Held Accountable

Fed’s Powell Calls U.S. Economy “Robust” as Personal Savings Rate Collapses to Same Level as in Financial Crisis of 2008

LAB LEAK CONFIRMED?: Senate Report Says Likely YES

BREAKDOWN: Will Biden's Move To SAVE US Semiconductors Work?

Web Summit BANS Grayzone Journalists For Ukraine Truth Telling!

Roger Waters live with The Grayzone

A Little Night Music

Clifton Chenier - Bon Ton Roulet

Clifton Chenier - Zodico Stomp

Clifton Chenier-Be My Chauffeur

I'm Coming Home (To See My Mother)

Clifton Chenier - Ay Tete Fee

Clifton Chenier - Release Me

Clifton Chenier - I'm A Hog For You Baby

Clifton Chenier - Choo Choo Ch'Boogie

Clifton Chenier - Alons A Grand Coteau

M'Appel Fou (They Call Me Crazy)

Clifton Chenier - The King of Zydeco Live