Vanuatu’s Minister of Climate Change Adaptation, Ralph Regenvanu, has welcomed the historic International Court of Justice (ICJ) climate ruling, calling it a “milestone in the fight for climate justice”.

The ICJ has delivered a landmark advisory opinion on states’ obligations under international law to act on climate change.

The ruling marks a major shift in the global push for climate justice.

• READ MORE: UN’s highest court finds countries can be held legally responsible for emissions
• ICJ climate crisis ruling: Will world’s top court back Pacific-led call to hold governments accountable?
• Do countries have a duty to prevent climate harm? The world’s highest court is about to answer this crucial question
• Other climate crisis reports

Vanuatu — one of the nations behind the campaign — has pledged to take the decision back to the UN General Assembly (UNGA) to seek a resolution supporting its full implementation.

Climate Change Minister Regenvanu said in a statement: “We now have a common foundation based on the rule of law, releasing us from the limitations of individual nations’ political interests that have dominated climate action.

“This moment will drive stronger action and accountability to protect our planet and peoples.”

The ICJ confirmed that state responsibilities extend beyond voluntary commitments under the UNFCCC and Paris Agreement.

It ruled that customary international law also requires states to prevent environmental and transboundary harm, protect human rights, and cooperate to address climate change impacts.

Duties apply to all states
These duties apply to all states, whether or not they have ratified specific climate treaties.

Violations of these obligations carry legal consequences. The ICJ clarified that climate damage can be scientifically traced to specific polluter states whose actions or inaction cause harm.

As a result, those states could be required to stop harmful activities, regulate private sector emissions, end fossil fuel subsidies, and provide reparations to affected states and individuals.

“The implementation of this decision will set a new status quo and the structural change required to give our current and future generations hope for a healthy planet and sustainable future,” Minister Regenvanu added.

He said high-emitting nations, especially those with a history of emissions, must be held accountable.

Despite continued fossil fuel expansion and weakening global ambition — compounded by the United States’ withdrawal from the Paris Agreement — Regenvanu said the ICJ ruling was a powerful tool for campaigners, lawyers, and governments.

“Vanuatu is proud and honoured to have spearheaded this initiative,” he said.

‘Powerful testament’
“The number of states and civil society actors that have joined this cause is a powerful testament to the leadership of Small Island Developing States (SIDS) and youth activists.”

The court’s decision follows a resolution adopted by consensus at the UNGA on 29 March 2023. That campaign was initiated by the Pacific Island Students Fighting Climate Change and backed by the Vanuatu government, calling for greater accountability from high-emitting countries.

The ruling will now be taken to the UNGA in September and is expected to be a central topic at COP30 in Brazil this November.

Vanuatu has committed to working with other nations to turn this legal outcome into coordinated action through diplomacy, policy, litigation, and international cooperation.<

“This is just the beginning,” Regenvanu said. “Success will depend on what happens next. We look forward to working with global partners to ensure this becomes a true turning point for climate justice.”

Republished from the Vanuatu Daily Post with permission.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

As immigrant rights protests spread to Chicago, we speak with Democratic Congressmember Delia Ramirez, who is the daughter of Guatemalan immigrants and married to a DACA recipient and recently called on Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem to resign. She responds to President Trump’s threat to deploy troops in more major cities to quell protests. “What you are seeing is the beginning of fascism,” says Ramirez, who represents parts of Chicago. “For fascists, they select a public enemy. And today, it’s an immigrant. … Tomorrow, it’s anyone they find undesirable.”

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

Legal experts and Māori advocates say the fight to protect Te Tiriti is only just beginning — as the controversial Treaty Principles Bill is officially killed in Parliament.

The bill — which seeks to redefine the principles of Te Tiriti o Waitangi — sparked a nationwide hīkoi and received more than 300,000 written submissions — with 90 percent of submitters opposing it.

Parliament confirmed the voting down of the bill yesterday, with only ACT supporting it proceeding further.

• READ MORE: The Treaty Principles Bill : Here’s what’s in it
• The Regulatory Standards Bill: What you need to know
• What you need to know about Māori wards
• Māori ward councillors prepare for election and referendum

The ayes were 11, and the noes 112.

Riana Te Ngahue, a young Māori lawyer whose bite-sized breakdowns of complex issues — like the Treaty Principles Bill — went viral on social media, said she was glad the bill was finally gone.

“It’s just frustrating that we’ve had to put so much time and energy into something that’s such a huge waste of time and money. I’m glad it’s over, but also disappointed because there are so many other harmful bills coming through — in the environment space, Oranga Tamariki, and others.”

Most New Zealanders not divided
Te Ngahue said the Justice Committee’s report — which showed 90 percent of submitters opposed the bill, 8 percent supported it, and 2 percent were unstated in their position — proved that most New Zealanders did not feel divided about Te Tiriti.

“If David Seymour was right in saying that New Zealanders feel divided about this issue, then we would’ve seen significantly more submissions supporting his bill.

“He seemed pretty delusional to keep pushing the idea that New Zealanders were behind him, because if that was true, he would’ve got a lot more support.”

However, Te Ngahue said it was “wicked” to see such overwhelming opposition.

“Especially because I know for a lot of people, this was their first time ever submitting on a bill. That’s what I think is really exciting.”

She said it was humbling to know her content helped people feel confident enough to participate in the process.

“I really didn’t expect that many people to watch my video, let alone actually find it helpful. I’m still blown away by people who say they only submitted because of it — that it showed them how.”

Te Ngahue said while the bill was made to be divisive there had been “a huge silver lining”.

“Because a lot of people have actually made the effort to get clued up on the Treaty of Waitangi, whereas before they might not have bothered because, you know, nothing was really that in your face about it.”

“There’s a big wave of people going ‘I actually wanna get clued up on [Te Tiriti],’ which is really cool.”

‘Fight isn’t over’
Māori lawyer Tania Waikato, whose own journey into social media advocacy empowered many first-time submitters, said she was in an “excited and celebratory” mood.

“We all had a bit of a crappy summer holiday because of the Treaty Principles Bill and the Regulatory Standards Bill both being released for consultation at the same time. A lot of us were trying to fit advocacy around summer holidays and looking after our tamariki, so this feels like a nice payoff for all the hard mahi that went in.”

She said the “overwhelming opposition” sent a powerful message.

“I think it’s a clear message that Aotearoa as a whole sees Te Tiriti as part of this country’s constitutional foundation. You can’t just come in and change that on a whim, like David Seymour and the ACT Party have tried to do.

“Ninety percent of people who got off their butt and made a submission have clearly rejected the divisive and racist rhetoric that party has pushed.”

Despite the win, she said the fight was far from over.

“If anything, this is really just beginning. We’ve got the Regulatory Standards Bill that’s going to be introduced at some point before June. That particular bill will do what the Treaty Principle’s Bill was aiming to do, but in a different and just more sneaky way.

‘The next fight’
“So for me, that’s definitely the next fight that we all gotta get up for again.”

Waikato, who also launched a petition in March calling for the free school lunch programme contract to be overhauled, said allowing the Treaty Principles Bill to get this far in the first place was a “waste of time and money.”

“Its an absolutely atrocious waste of taxpayers dollars, especially when we’ve got issues like the school lunches that I am advocating for on the other side.”

“So for me, the fight’s far from over. It’s really just getting started.”

ACT Party leader David Seymour continued to defend the Treaty Principles Bill during its second reading on Thursday, and said the debate over the treaty’s principles was far from over.

After being the only party to vote in favour of the bill, Seymour said not a single statement had grappled with the content of the bill — despite all the debate.

Asked if his party had lost in this nationwide conversation, he said they still had not heard a good argument against it.

‘We’ll never give up on equal rights.”

He said there were lots of options for continuing, and the party’s approach would be made clear before the next election

Eyes on local elections – ActionStation says the mahi continues
Community advocacy group ActionStation’s director Kassie Hartendorp, who helped spearhead campaigns like “Together for Te Tiriti”, said her team was feeling really positive.

“It’s been a lot of work to get to this point, but we feel like this is a very good day for our country.”

At the end of the hīkoi mō Te Tiriti, ActionStation co-delivered a Ngāti Whakaue rangatahi led petition opposing the Treaty Principles Bill, with more than 290,000 signatures — the second largest petition in Aotearoa’s history.

They also hosted a live watch party for the bill’s second reading on Facebook, joined by Te Tiriti experts Dr Carwyn Jones and Tania Waikato.

Hartendorp said it was amazing to see people from all over Aotearoa coming together to reject the bill.

“It’s no longer a minority view that we should respect, but more and more and more people realise that it’s a fundamental part of our national identity that should be respected and not trampled every time a government wants to win power,” she said.

Looking to the future, Hartendorp said Thursday’s victory was only one milestone in a longer campaign.

Why people fought back
“There was a future where this bill hadn’t gone down — this could’ve ended very differently. The reason we’re here now is because people fought back.

“People from all backgrounds and ages said: ‘We respect Te Tiriti o Waitangi.’

“We know it’s essential, it’s a part of our history, our past, our present, and our future. And we want to respect that together.”

Hartendorp said they were now gearing up to fight against essentially another version of the Treaty Principles Bill — but on a local level.

“In October, people in 42 councils around the country will vote on whether or not to keep their Māori ward councillors, and we think this is going to be a really big deal.”

The Regulatory Standards Bill is also being closely watched, Hartendorp said, and she believed it could mirror the “divisive tactics” seen with the Treaty Principles Bill.

“Part of the strategy for David Seymour and the ACT Party was to win over the public mandate by saying the public stands against Te Tiriti o Waitangi. That debate is still on,” she said.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

Image by Marc Pell.

The numbers are coming in, and as always, the estimates vary widely. Let’s just say there were more than a million people across the United States in the streets protesting the excesses of the Trump administration since January 20, 2025. Also, like always, the demands of the organizers (who went by the name Hands Off) were often transcended by the intentions of those actually attending the rallies, marches and other manifestations of discontent. Just as predictable as the speculation about the number of people in the streets are the complaints by some on the left, complaining that the protest demands were not radical enough and were just an attempt by the Democratic party to divert the growing anger of the US population.

Meanwhile, another large march was held in the streets of Washington, DC. This protest was organized by Palestinian solidarity organizations, leftist groups against US imperialism, Muslim and Jewish organizations opposed to the Israel-US genocide and occupation in Palestine and others. It’s estimated that this protest involved at least a hundred thousand or more protesters. In addition, many of the local protests organized under the auspices of the Hands Off group highlighted the US-Israeli massacre in Gaza and the West Bank. This meant that the opposition to the occupation and the repression of anti-occupation protesters was humanized and brought to the attention of thousands of US residents who previously had only the anti-Palestinian US media providing its take on the slaughter. This is a positive development, especially as the crackdown on students and others supporting an end to the Israeli occupation takes a considerably more ominous and despotic turn.

At Vermont’s two largest protests—Montpelier (3000 or more) and Burlington(1000)—there was a substantial anti-genocide presence. Montpelier also had a large labor presence. However, the majority of people were liberals. Instead of disparaging the protesters, who are angry and looking for answers, we should focus our criticism on the leadership while encouraging the anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist dialogue being introduced to these new protesters. Unless the left starts getting its own act together, the Democrats will turn these into a US version of the color “revolutions,” putting the neoliberals who helped get us to this point back into power. Nothing will change. The ruling class shell game will continue only with the house having better odds than at any time in US history.

The previous remark regarding the kvetching from some on the left about the liberal nature of the organizers was not meant to disparage the content of those leftists’ critique. Indeed, it’s quite accurate at its core. This is not unusual or unique; it does need to be addressed. Historically speaking, many if not most of the protest movements since World War Two for greater rights and economic justice in the United States have been popularized by liberals. Those that arguably weren’t—the movement against the US war on Vietnam, for example—reached their peak when more liberal organizers took the reins from the leftist and radical pacifist organizers that birthed the movement. At the same time, the efforts of the liberals and the subsequent popularization of the essential demands of the civil rights movement opened space for revolutionary groups like the Black Panthers to exist and grow. Looking back, the results of this dynamic are at best, mixed. Radical organizations exist in the historical record, with some even getting the respect they deserve. However, their descendants in today’s political milieu are left out of the conversation and, when they do make enough noise to be heard, they are arrested, fired from their jobs, and attacked as agents of some foreign power. This is exactly what we are seeing happen to the radical movement calling for Palestinian freedom and against the US-Israeli genocide of Palestinians.

There is a historical moment taking place. The US ruling class has exposed its fascist core. Trumpism is the manifestation of long-time right-wing dreams. Sure, it’s a bit uncouth for the more cultured on the right, but that hasn’t prevented them from supporting the Trumpist executive orders designed to destroy what remains of the social welfare system in the United States. The wealthy understand that to achieve the complete power they desire, some may suffer. They intend to make sure it is not them who do. Furthermore, they believe the suffering they cause now will make them very rich later, when private endeavors run former government programs.

The role of the liberals organizing protests like those this past weekend is to save US capitalism. They may not see themselves in that role, but the objective truth says otherwise. The ruling elites represented by the Democrats believe that by keeping working people employed and benefiting from capitalism, they will continue to rule and make money. The programs the Trumpists and their right-wing allies want to cut will render such a scenario impossible. Neither sector of the ruling class can abide Palestinian freedom from occupation. Nor can either sector free itself from the war machine that

US capital relies on for its plans of permanence.

The role of the radical left regarding these types of protests is to show up with our signs and our energy; to join organizing committees and coalitions and push the demands leftward. A friend in Olympia, Washington wrote on social media that the organizers there included anti-occupation activists who made the demands around Palestine and the repression of anti-occupation activists part of the program. This is a great example of how these protests can be expanded beyond the Democrats’ agenda—an agenda that became obvious when NATO was one of the programs the organizers demanded Trump keep his hands off of.

Let me close with the final sentences of a recently-released pamphlet from Fomite Press: “What is needed is a popular rejection of the Trump White House and its fascism; not just one led by Democrats in the courts and the legislature. This struggle needs to be waged in the streets, the schools, the workplace and throughout the United States. It’s a struggle against fascism, not a battle between the political parties of the elites.”

Onward.

The post A Beginning, Not an End: Hands Off What? appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Ron Jacobs.

Image by Marc Pell.

The numbers are coming in, and as always, the estimates vary widely. Let’s just say there were more than a million people across the United States in the streets protesting the excesses of the Trump administration since January 20, 2025. Also, like always, the demands of the organizers (who went by the name Hands Off) were often transcended by the intentions of those actually attending the rallies, marches and other manifestations of discontent. Just as predictable as the speculation about the number of people in the streets are the complaints by some on the left, complaining that the protest demands were not radical enough and were just an attempt by the Democratic party to divert the growing anger of the US population.

Meanwhile, another large march was held in the streets of Washington, DC. This protest was organized by Palestinian solidarity organizations, leftist groups against US imperialism, Muslim and Jewish organizations opposed to the Israel-US genocide and occupation in Palestine and others. It’s estimated that this protest involved at least a hundred thousand or more protesters. In addition, many of the local protests organized under the auspices of the Hands Off group highlighted the US-Israeli massacre in Gaza and the West Bank. This meant that the opposition to the occupation and the repression of anti-occupation protesters was humanized and brought to the attention of thousands of US residents who previously had only the anti-Palestinian US media providing its take on the slaughter. This is a positive development, especially as the crackdown on students and others supporting an end to the Israeli occupation takes a considerably more ominous and despotic turn.

At Vermont’s two largest protests—Montpelier (3000 or more) and Burlington(1000)—there was a substantial anti-genocide presence. Montpelier also had a large labor presence. However, the majority of people were liberals. Instead of disparaging the protesters, who are angry and looking for answers, we should focus our criticism on the leadership while encouraging the anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist dialogue being introduced to these new protesters. Unless the left starts getting its own act together, the Democrats will turn these into a US version of the color “revolutions,” putting the neoliberals who helped get us to this point back into power. Nothing will change. The ruling class shell game will continue only with the house having better odds than at any time in US history.

The previous remark regarding the kvetching from some on the left about the liberal nature of the organizers was not meant to disparage the content of those leftists’ critique. Indeed, it’s quite accurate at its core. This is not unusual or unique; it does need to be addressed. Historically speaking, many if not most of the protest movements since World War Two for greater rights and economic justice in the United States have been popularized by liberals. Those that arguably weren’t—the movement against the US war on Vietnam, for example—reached their peak when more liberal organizers took the reins from the leftist and radical pacifist organizers that birthed the movement. At the same time, the efforts of the liberals and the subsequent popularization of the essential demands of the civil rights movement opened space for revolutionary groups like the Black Panthers to exist and grow. Looking back, the results of this dynamic are at best, mixed. Radical organizations exist in the historical record, with some even getting the respect they deserve. However, their descendants in today’s political milieu are left out of the conversation and, when they do make enough noise to be heard, they are arrested, fired from their jobs, and attacked as agents of some foreign power. This is exactly what we are seeing happen to the radical movement calling for Palestinian freedom and against the US-Israeli genocide of Palestinians.

There is a historical moment taking place. The US ruling class has exposed its fascist core. Trumpism is the manifestation of long-time right-wing dreams. Sure, it’s a bit uncouth for the more cultured on the right, but that hasn’t prevented them from supporting the Trumpist executive orders designed to destroy what remains of the social welfare system in the United States. The wealthy understand that to achieve the complete power they desire, some may suffer. They intend to make sure it is not them who do. Furthermore, they believe the suffering they cause now will make them very rich later, when private endeavors run former government programs.

The role of the liberals organizing protests like those this past weekend is to save US capitalism. They may not see themselves in that role, but the objective truth says otherwise. The ruling elites represented by the Democrats believe that by keeping working people employed and benefiting from capitalism, they will continue to rule and make money. The programs the Trumpists and their right-wing allies want to cut will render such a scenario impossible. Neither sector of the ruling class can abide Palestinian freedom from occupation. Nor can either sector free itself from the war machine that

US capital relies on for its plans of permanence.

The role of the radical left regarding these types of protests is to show up with our signs and our energy; to join organizing committees and coalitions and push the demands leftward. A friend in Olympia, Washington wrote on social media that the organizers there included anti-occupation activists who made the demands around Palestine and the repression of anti-occupation activists part of the program. This is a great example of how these protests can be expanded beyond the Democrats’ agenda—an agenda that became obvious when NATO was one of the programs the organizers demanded Trump keep his hands off of.

Let me close with the final sentences of a recently-released pamphlet from Fomite Press: “What is needed is a popular rejection of the Trump White House and its fascism; not just one led by Democrats in the courts and the legislature. This struggle needs to be waged in the streets, the schools, the workplace and throughout the United States. It’s a struggle against fascism, not a battle between the political parties of the elites.”

Onward.

The post A Beginning, Not an End: Hands Off What? appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Ron Jacobs.

When European Union leaders met in Brussels on February 6th to discuss the war in Ukraine, French President Emmanuel Macron called this time “a turning point in history.” Western leaders agree that this is an historic moment when decisive action is needed, but what kind of action depends on their interpretation of the nature of this moment.

Is this the beginning of a new Cold War between the U.S., NATO and Russia or the end of one? Will Russia and the West remain implacable enemies for the foreseeable future, with a new iron curtain between them through what was once the heart of Ukraine? Or can the United States and Russia resolve the disputes and hostility that led to this war in the first place, so as to leave Ukraine with a stable and lasting peace?

Some European leaders see this moment as the beginning of a long struggle with Russia, akin to the beginning of the Cold War in 1946, when Winston Churchill warned that “an iron curtain has descended” across Europe.

On March 2nd, echoing Churchill, European Council President Ursula von der Leyen declared that Europe must turn Ukraine into a “steel porcupine.” President Zelenskyy has said he wants up to 200,000 European troops on the eventual ceasefire line between Russia and Ukraine to “guarantee” any peace agreement, and insists that the United States must provide a “backstop,” meaning a commitment to send U.S. forces to fight in Ukraine if war breaks out again.

Russia has repeatedly said it won’t agree to NATO forces being based in Ukraine under any guise. “We explained today that the appearance of armed forces from the same NATO countries, but under a false flag, under the flag of the European Union or under national flags, does not change anything in this regard,” Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on February 18. “Of course this is unacceptable to us.”

But the U.K. is persisting in a campaign to recruit a “coalition of the willing,” the same term the U.S. and U.K. coined for the list of countries they persuaded to support the illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003. In that case, only Australia, Denmark and Poland took small parts in the invasion, Costa Rica publicly insisted on being removed from the list, and the term was widely lampooned as the “coalition of the billing” because the U.S. recruited so many countries to join it by promising them lucrative foreign aid deals.

Far from the start of a new Cold War, President Trump and other leaders see this moment as more akin to the end of the original Cold War, when U.S. President Ronald Reagan and Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev met in Reykjavik in Iceland in 1986 and began to bridge the divisions caused by 40 years of Cold War hostility.

Like Trump and Putin today, Reagan and Gorbachev were unlikely peacemakers. Gorbachev had risen through the ranks of the Soviet Communist Party to become its General Secretary and Soviet Premier in March 1985, in the midst of the Soviet war in Afghanistan, and he didn’t begin to withdraw Soviet forces from Afghanistan until 1988. Reagan oversaw an unprecedented Cold War arms build-up, a U.S.-backed genocide in Guatemala and covert and proxy wars throughout Central America. And yet Gorbachev and Reagan are now widely remembered as peacemakers.

While Democrats deride Trump as a Putin stooge, in his first term in office Trump was actually responsible for escalating the Cold War with Russia. After the Pentagon had milked its absurd, self-fulfilling “War on Terror” for trillions of dollars, it was Trump and his psychopathic Defense Secretary, General “Mad Dog” Mattis, who declared the shift back to strategic competition with Russia and China as the Pentagon’s new gravy train in their 2018 National Defense Strategy. It was also Trump who lifted President Obama’s restrictions on sending offensive weapons to Ukraine.

Trump’s head-spinning about-turn in U.S. policy has left its European allies with whiplash and reversed the roles they each have played for generations. France and Germany have traditionally been the diplomats and peacemakers in the Western alliance, while the U.S. and U.K. have been infected with a chronic case of war fever that has proven resistant to a long string of military defeats and catastrophic impacts on every country that has fallen prey to their warmongering.

In 2003, France’s Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin led the opposition to the invasion of Iraq in the UN Security Council. France, Germany and Russia issued a joint statement to say that they would “not let a proposed resolution pass that would authorize the use of force. Russia and France, as permanent members of the Security Council, will assume all their responsibilities on this point.”

At a press conference in Paris with German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, French President Jacques Chirac said, “Everything must be done to avoid war… As far as we’re concerned, war always means failure.”

As recently as 2022, after Russia invaded Ukraine, it was once again the U.S. and U.K. that rejected and blocked peace negotiations in favor of a long war, while France, Germany and Italy continued to call for new negotiations, even as they gradually fell in line with the U.S. long war policy.

Former German Chancellor Schröder took part in the peace negotiations in Turkey in March and April 2022, and flew to Moscow at Ukraine’s request to meet with Putin. In an interview with Berliner Zeitung in 2023, Schröder confirmed that the peace talks only failed “because everything was decided in Washington.”

With Biden still blocking new negotiations in 2023, one of the interviewers asked Schröder “Do you think you can resume your peace plan?”

Schröder replied, “Yes, and the only ones who can initiate this are France and Germany… Macron and Scholz are the only ones who can talk to Putin. Chirac and I did the same in the Iraq war. Why can’t support for Ukraine be combined with an offer of talks to Russia? The arms deliveries are not a solution for eternity. But no one wants to talk. Everyone sits in trenches. How many more people have to die?”

Since 2022, President Macron and a Thatcherite team of iron ladies – European Council President von der Leyen; former German Foreign Minister Analena Baerbock; and Estonia’s former prime minister Kaja Kallas, now the EU’s foreign policy chief – have promoted a new militarization of Europe, egged on from behind the scenes by European and U.S. arms manufacturers.

Has the passage of time, the passing of the World War II generation and the distortion of history washed away the historical memory of two world wars from a continent that was destroyed by war only 80 years ago? Where is the next generation of French and German diplomats in the tradition of de Villepin and Schröder today? How can sending German tanks to fight in Ukraine, and now in Russia itself, fail to remind Russians of previous German invasions and solidify support for the war? And won’t the call for Europe to confront Russia by moving from a “welfare state to a warfare state” only feed the rise of the European hard right?

So are the new European militarists reading the historical moment correctly? Or are they jumping on the bandwagon of a disastrous Cold War that could, as Biden and Trump have warned, lead to World War III?

When Trump’s foreign policy team met with their Russian counterparts in Saudi Arabia on February 18, ending the war in Ukraine was the second part of the three-part plan they agreed on. The first was to restore full diplomatic relations between the United States and Russia, and the third was to work on a series of other problems in U.S.-Russian relations.

The order of these three stages is interesting, because, as Secretary of State Marco Rubio noted, it means that the negotiations over Ukraine will be the first test of restored relations between the U.S. and Russia.

If the negotiations for peace in Ukraine are successful, they can lead to further negotiations over restoring arms control treaties, nuclear disarmament and cooperation on other global problems that have been impossible to resolve in a world stuck in a zombie-like Cold War that powerful interests would not allow to die.

It was a welcome change to hear Secretary Rubio say that the post-Cold War unipolar world was an anomaly and that now we have to adjust to the reality of a multipolar world. But if Trump and his hawkish advisers are just trying to restore U.S. relations with Russia as part of a “reverse Kissinger” scheme to isolate China, as some analysts have suggested, that would perpetuate America’s debilitating geopolitical crisis instead of solving it.

The United States and our friends in Europe have a new chance to make a clean break from the three-way geopolitical power struggle between the United States, Russia and China that has hamstrung the world since the 1970s, and to find new roles and priorities for our countries in the emerging multipolar world of the 21st Century.

We hope that Trump and European leaders can recognize the crossroads at which they are standing, and the chance history is giving them to choose the path of peace. France and Germany in particular should remember the wisdom of Dominique de Villepin, Jacques Chirac and Gerhard Schröder in the face of U.S. and British plans for aggression against Iraq in 2003.

This could be the beginning of the end of the permanent state of war and Cold War that has held the world in its grip for more than a century. Ending it would allow us to finally prioritize the progress and cooperation we so desperately need to solve the other critical problems the whole world is facing in the 21st Century. As General Milley said back in November 2022 when he called for negotiations between Ukraine and Russia, we must “seize the moment.”

The post Is This the Beginning or the End of a New Cold War? appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Medea Benjamin - Nicolas J. S. Davies.

Woman at rally supporting peace negotiations between Russia and Ukraine in Berlin, Germany.  (Photo: Reuters)

When European Union leaders met in Brussels on February 6 to discuss the war in Ukraine, French President Emmanuel Macron called this time “a turning point in history.” Western leaders agree that this is an historic moment when decisive action is needed, but what kind of action depends on their interpretation of the nature of this moment.

Is this the beginning of a new Cold War between the U.S., NATO and Russia or the end of one? Will Russia and the West remain implacable enemies for the foreseeable future, with a new iron curtain between them through what was once the heart of Ukraine? Or can the United States and Russia resolve the disputes and hostility that led to this war in the first place, so as to leave Ukraine with a stable and lasting peace?

Some European leaders see this moment as the beginning of a long struggle with Russia, akin to the beginning of the Cold War in 1946, when Winston Churchill warned that “an iron curtain has descended” across Europe.

On March 2, echoing Churchill, European Council President Ursula von der Leyen declared that Europe must turn Ukraine into a “steel porcupine.” President Zelenskyy has said he wants up to 200,000 European troops on the eventual ceasefire line between Russia and Ukraine to “guarantee” any peace agreement, and insists that the United States must provide a “backstop,” meaning a commitment to send U.S. forces to fight in Ukraine if war breaks out again.

Russia has repeatedly said it won’t agree to NATO forces being based in Ukraine under any guise. “We explained today that the appearance of armed forces from the same NATO countries, but under a false flag, under the flag of the European Union or under national flags, does not change anything in this regard,” Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on February 18. “Of course this is unacceptable to us.”

But the U.K. is persisting in a campaign to recruit a “coalition of the willing,” the same term the U.S. and U.K. coined for the list of countries they persuaded to support the illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003. In that case, only Australia, Denmark and Poland took small parts in the invasion, Costa Rica publicly insisted on being removed from the list, and the term was widely lampooned as the “coalition of the billing” because the U.S. recruited so many countries to join it by promising them lucrative foreign aid deals.

Far from the start of a new Cold War, President Trump and other leaders see this moment as more akin to the end of the original Cold War, when U.S. President Ronald Reagan and Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev met in Reykjavik in Iceland in 1986 and began to bridge the divisions caused by 40 years of Cold War hostility.

Like Trump and Putin today, Reagan and Gorbachev were unlikely peacemakers. Gorbachev had risen through the ranks of the Soviet Communist Party to become its General Secretary and Soviet Premier in March 1985, in the midst of the Soviet war in Afghanistan, and he didn’t begin to withdraw Soviet forces from Afghanistan until 1988. Reagan oversaw an unprecedented Cold War arms build-up, a U.S.-backed genocide in Guatemala and covert and proxy wars throughout Central America. And yet Gorbachev and Reagan are now widely remembered as peacemakers.

While Democrats deride Trump as a Putin stooge, in his first term in office Trump was actually responsible for escalating the Cold War with Russia. After the Pentagon had milked its absurd, self-fulfilling “War on Terror” for trillions of dollars, it was Trump and his psychopathic Defense Secretary, General “Mad Dog” Mattis, who declared the shift back to strategic competition with Russia and China as the Pentagon’s new gravy train in their 2018 National Defense Strategy. It was also Trump who lifted President Obama’s restrictions on sending offensive weapons to Ukraine.

Trump’s head-spinning about-turn in U.S. policy has left its European allies with whiplash and reversed the roles they each have played for generations. France and Germany have traditionally been the diplomats and peacemakers in the Western alliance, while the U.S. and U.K. have been infected with a chronic case of war fever that has proven resistant to a long string of military defeats and catastrophic impacts on every country that has fallen prey to their warmongering.

In 2003, France’s Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin led the opposition to the invasion of Iraq in the UN Security Council. France, Germany and Russia issued a joint statement to say that they would “not let a proposed resolution pass that would authorize the use of force. Russia and France, as permanent members of the Security Council, will assume all their responsibilities on this point.”

At a press conference in Paris with German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, French President Jacques Chirac said, “Everything must be done to avoid war… As far as we’re concerned, war always means failure.”

As recently as 2022, after Russia invaded Ukraine, it was once again the U.S. and U.K. that rejected and blocked peace negotiations in favor of a long war, while France, Germany and Italy continued to call for new negotiations, even as they gradually fell in line with the U.S. long war policy.

Former German Chancellor Schröder took part in the peace negotiations in Turkey in March and April 2022, and flew to Moscow at Ukraine’s request to meet with Putin. In an interview with Berliner Zeitung in 2023, Schröder confirmed that the peace talks only failed “because everything was decided in Washington.”

With Biden still blocking new negotiations in 2023, one of the interviewers asked Schröder “Do you think you can resume your peace plan?”

Schröder replied, “Yes, and the only ones who can initiate this are France and Germany… Macron and Scholz are the only ones who can talk to Putin. Chirac and I did the same in the Iraq war. Why can’t support for Ukraine be combined with an offer of talks to Russia? The arms deliveries are not a solution for eternity. But no one wants to talk. Everyone sits in trenches. How many more people have to die?”

Since 2022, President Macron and a Thatcherite team of iron ladies – European Council President von der Leyen; former German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock; and Estonia’s former prime minister Kaja Kallas, now the EU’s foreign policy chief – have promoted a new militarization of Europe, egged on from behind the scenes by European and U.S. arms manufacturers.

Has the passage of time, the passing of the World War II generation and the distortion of history washed away the historical memory of two world wars from a continent that was destroyed by war only 80 years ago? Where is the next generation of French and German diplomats in the tradition of de Villepin and Schröder today? How can sending German tanks to fight in Ukraine, and now in Russia itself, fail to remind Russians of previous German invasions and solidify support for the war? And won’t the call for Europe to confront Russia by moving from a “welfare state to a warfare state” only feed the rise of the European hard right?

So are the new European militarists reading the historical moment correctly? Or are they jumping on the bandwagon of a disastrous Cold War that could, as Biden and Trump have warned, lead to World War III?

When Trump’s foreign policy team met with their Russian counterparts in Saudi Arabia on February 18, ending the war in Ukraine was the second part of the three-part plan they agreed on. The first was to restore full diplomatic relations between the United States and Russia, and the third was to work on a series of other problems in U.S.-Russian relations.

The order of these three stages is interesting, because, as Secretary of State Marco Rubio noted, it means that the negotiations over Ukraine will be the first test of restored relations between the U.S. and Russia.

If the negotiations for peace in Ukraine are successful, they can lead to further negotiations over restoring arms control treaties, nuclear disarmament and cooperation on other global problems that have been impossible to resolve in a world stuck in a zombie-like Cold War that powerful interests would not allow to die.

It was a welcome change to hear Secretary Rubio say that the post-Cold War unipolar world was an anomaly and that now we have to adjust to the reality of a multipolar world. But if Trump and his hawkish advisers are just trying to restore U.S. relations with Russia as part of a “reverse Kissinger” scheme to isolate China, as some analysts have suggested, that would perpetuate America’s debilitating geopolitical crisis instead of solving it.

The United States and our friends in Europe have a new chance to make a clean break from the three-way geopolitical power struggle between the United States, Russia and China that has hamstrung the world since the 1970s, and to find new roles and priorities for our countries in the emerging multipolar world of the 21st Century.

We hope that Trump and European leaders can recognize the crossroads at which they are standing, and the chance history is giving them to choose the path of peace. France and Germany in particular should remember the wisdom of Dominique de Villepin, Jacques Chirac and Gerhard Schröder in the face of U.S. and British plans for aggression against Iraq in 2003.

This could be the beginning of the end of the permanent state of war and Cold War that has held the world in its grip for more than a century. Ending it would allow us to finally prioritize the progress and cooperation we so desperately need to solve the other critical problems the whole world is facing in the 21st Century. As General Milley said back in November 2022 when he called for negotiations between Ukraine and Russia, we must “seize the moment.”

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J.S. Davies.

The vision

“I want people to understand that vegan food isn’t just for a select few. It’s an inclusive eating style. Reaching beyond the vegan community is essential for creating a vegan-friendly world.”

— Azumi Yamanaka, a vegan activist in Tokyo

The spotlight

When you think of Japanese cuisine, your mind might go straight to sushi. Or pork ramen. Or, if you’re a little fancy, maybe Kobe beef. The country is famous for top-of-the-line meat and fresh fish. But did you know that, for 1,200 years, meat-eating was banned in the country? An emperor ended the ban In the late 1800s, as part of an effort to Westernize and open the island nation up to the world — against protests from Buddhist monks that eating meat amounted to “destroying the soul of the Japanese people.” The result: A rapid rise in consumption of meat, egg, and dairy products. Eating meat became a symbol of power and status, and eventually the cultural norm. Today, Japan ranks 11th in global beef consumption, and vegan options are difficult to find, especially outside of major city centers.

Two-hundred years ago, plant-based eating in Japan had a lot to do with religion and practicality. But today, some advocates are trying to renew the country’s interest in veganism — for climate and animal welfare concerns.

Grist fellow Sachi Kitajima Mulkey is Japanese and American, and spent years living in Kyoto where her family is. “When you’re an American living in Japan, your friends visit all the time. They’re so stoked to have a free place to stay,” she said, adding that many of her American friends were vegetarian or vegan. “And I just remember how hard it was,” she said. Meat, eggs, and dairy were difficult to avoid, not to mention the dashi, or fish broth, that forms the base of many dishes.

But then, something shifted. Around five years ago, she started noticing vegan products at the stores and restaurants she went to. “Almond milk was suddenly available, when it wasn’t before,” she recalled. Earlier this month, she teamed up with Grist’s Joseph Winters to write a feature on the rise of veganism in Japan.

Interestingly, the push to include more vegan options in restaurants and supermarkets seems to be fueled in part — again — by the country’s desire to cater to outsiders. “A lot of the new vegan initiatives are driven by an increase in tourism and trying to accommodate tourists,” Winters said. For instance, in the lead-up to the 2020 Olympics in Tokyo (which wound up being held in the summer of 2021), the government developed a set of guidelines and certification marks to help restaurants offer more vegan options for visitors, and even offered subsidies for them.

But the push to increase plant-based options is also a part of meeting national and local climate goals — Japan has pledged to halve emissions by 2030. In the city of Kyoto, which has its own aggressive emissions targets, plant-based eating is part of the plan to get there.

Still, barriers exist for Japanese residents who want to go vegan. Some mirror the barriers that many face in the U.S. — a lack of accessible options, and a stigma that meat-free diets are not nutritious — but some are also unique to Japan’s customs. “It is a culture where bucking the norm is really looked down upon,” Mulkey said. “It’s very difficult to feel like you’re asking for any kind of special accommodations. It’s all about humility and the group and fitting in.”

Mulkey even experienced this herself when she was home visiting family and reporting the story. She tried to eat vegan as much as she could, but was concerned about offending her loved ones by turning down meat, or inconveniencing them by dragging them to yet another vegan restaurant.

Winters joked that this is often what it’s like traveling as a vegan. “It just becomes a food travel experience,” he said. “You have your list of all of the sights, and it’s just vegan restaurants — and then like, ‘OK, I guess we’ll go see the Sistine Chapel or whatever.’”

As far as the impact of the story, Winters hopes that reporting on veganism and the way it’s showing up in different parts of the world can help make the idea more accessible for people. And Mulkey noted that she was particularly excited to frame the story with a Japanese audience in mind (the piece was co-published with The Japan Times).

“It’s exciting to see a culture that is so slow to change kind of move quite quickly on this, actually,” she said. “It is nice to think that, in a moment where the country does want to open itself up for more travel and have people visit, it can accommodate people more.”

In the excerpt below, Mulkey and Winters delve into the history of Japan’s relationship with meat, and also what vegan advocates and chefs are cooking up — and working against — today. Check out the full piece on the Grist site, here.

— Claire Elise Thompson

In meat- and fish-loving Japan, veganism is making a comeback (Excerpt)

All is quiet at 10:30 a.m. on a Thursday in Shibuya, Tokyo’s famous commercial district. In an alleyway just steps from one of the busiest train stations in the world, a short line of tourists huddles outside of a bar. Finally, half an hour later, the door cracks open and, greeted with a soft irasshaimase, or “welcome,” the parties shuffle in to sample one of the rarest dishes in Japan: faux-fish sushi.

“Nowadays, there are many vegan ‘meat’ products,” says Kazue Maeda, one of the four founding employees of the restaurant, Vegan Sushi Tokyo. “But I’m Japanese. What I really used to love is sushi and salmon.”

Her restaurant attempts to fill a relatively unclaimed niche in the local food scene. Even in Tokyo, where much of the country’s vegan population lives, plant-based versions of traditional Japanese food remain challenging to find — most vegan options are yōshoku, a popular cuisine that puts a Japanese twist on Western dishes like hamburgers. Vegan Sushi Tokyo is open only for lunch: Although rave reviews keep pouring in from customers, the small business still doesn’t have a storefront of its own and rents out the interior of a bar by day. It serves 10-piece nigiri lunch sets, which include a plant-based Japanese-style “egg,” “shrimp” tempura, and beads made out of seaweed that look nearly indistinguishable from salmon roe.

For all its differences from the United States, Japan’s culinary culture takes after America’s in a key way: It’s difficult to avoid meat and dairy. Of course, soybean products like tofu are the star of many dishes. But beef, pork, chicken, eggs, or dairy also feature in nearly everything, from ramen to okonomiyaki, a savory cabbage and pork pancake. And then there’s the fish — served raw in sushi and sashimi, grilled as fillets, fried in tempura, shaved as a garnish, and present in nearly all other dishes as dashi, a savory broth made of dried tuna flakes and kelp.

Maeda became a vegan six years ago, due to her growing concern over environmental and animal rights issues. It’s a familiar origin story for those who have come to defy the typical Japanese diet by giving up animal products. “In terms of the vegan movement, I think we’re maybe behind other countries. The number of vegans is very small,” Maeda says. “But there are more and more vegetarian and vegan restaurants in Tokyo, I think because of tourists — especially from countries with many vegetarian people.”

Outside large cities like Tokyo, Osaka, and Kyoto, vegan options quickly vanish. In a culture that prizes convention and scrupulous attention to detail, individual accommodations — like vegan menu substitutions — are often frowned upon. And as in many other countries, vegan options are sometimes stigmatized as less nutritious.

But recently, things have been changing. The anticipation of a tourism boom for the 2020 Olympics in Tokyo pushed the Japanese government to encourage new vegan businesses and menu options in major cities. And in the years since, restaurants like Maeda’s have sprung up, offering novel adaptations of traditional dishes. Under pressure from Japan’s pledge to nearly halve its carbon emissions by 2030, the government has also begun collaborating with vegan activists and advocates and awarding grants to alternative protein start-ups. Though challenges remain, it’s gotten easier and easier to go vegan in Japan over the last decade.

“Climate issues and animal issues are growing,” Maeda said. “For me, I can’t imagine going back to eating meat again.”

The first guests of the day line up outside the door of Vegan Sushi Tokyo in Shibuya. Sachi Kitajima Mulkey / Grist

Convincing people to eat less meat is key to reaching international climate goals. Up to 20 percent of planet-warming greenhouse gases emitted annually come from animal agriculture alone — all the cows, pigs, lambs, chickens, and other animals (not including fish) that people raise for meat, milk, eggs, and the like. According to one study from the University of Oxford that looked at the diets of over 55,000 people, vegans — defined as those who eschew all animal products — create 75 percent less climate pollution through their food choices than those who eat a meat-heavy diet.

For most of the last two millennia, the Japanese diet was a model of climate-friendly eating due to Buddhist and Shinto objections to meat and dairy consumption — although fish has long been a staple. Beginning in 675 A.D., meat-eating was banned by official imperial decree.

The ban set the stage for the flourishing of shōjin ryōri, a traditional cuisine that arrived in the sixth century along with Buddhism and aligns with the religion’s prohibition against killing animals. In the 13th century, the cuisine developed into a spiritual movement focused on simplicity and balance between one’s mind and body. “‘Shōjin ryōri’ literally means ‘food for spiritual practice,’” one Japanese studies professor told the BBC.

A typical shōjin ryōri set meal is vegan, highlights seasonal produce, and is designed around sets of five — five colors, five flavors, and five cooking methods. While it can still commonly be found in the dining halls of Buddhist temples, modern chefs have taken shōjin ryōri into the mainstream, including in Michelin-starred restaurants, where they emphasize the concept’s focus on harmony with nature by using local ingredients and minimizing waste.

It wasn’t until 1872 that Emperor Meiji lifted the meat-eating ban, seeking to usher in an era of Westernization. Meat consumption grew quickly as domestic beef production boomed, and animal products became a symbol of power and status. As reports spread that Emperor Meiji drank milk twice a day, dairy consumption became more popular, too.

Today, Japan ranks 11th in beef consumption globally, and its per capita milk consumption is 68 percent higher than that of the average East Asian country. Japanese people buy eight times more meat than they did in the 1960s, and in 2007, families began eating it more than fish. (Japanese people still only eat half as much meat, not including seafood, as Americans.)

But interest in plant-based foods appears to be growing, as it is in Western countries. Japan’s market for plant-based foods tripled between 2015 and 2020, and the Japanese Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry, and Fisheries expects it to double again by 2030. These shifts have taken place as the Japanese population at large has expressed a readiness to shift toward plant-based products for health, animal welfare, and climate-related reasons, according to a 2022 analysis in the Journal of Agricultural Management.

Although no official government statistic exists, a 2021 survey found that 2.2 percent of Japanese people identify as vegan — a potentially higher percentage than in the United States, where estimates range from 1 to 4 percent.

But even though vegan restaurants have been on the upswing since 2017, Japanese vegans seem to have fewer options than their American counterparts. According to HappyCow, a popular directory of vegan and vegetarian restaurant options, Japan has fewer than six vegetarian restaurants per 1 million people in Japan, more than a fifth of them in Tokyo. By comparison, there are nine vegetarian restaurants per 1 million people in the U.S.

“Even many chefs still don’t know what vegan is, they don’t know the concept,” said Azumi Yamanaka, a vegan activist in Tokyo. She met with a reporter from Grist for a late lunch at Brown Rice, a sleek vegan restaurant with an organic, health-focused menu near Harajuku, the country’s famous fashion capital. For her meal, she ordered the weekly teishoku special, which came with a selection of small seasonal vegetable dishes, rice, and miso soup. “They don’t realize that adding a small piece of bacon or fish is still meat. I still have to explain it,” she said, while picking at a slice of roasted lotus root with her chopsticks.

When Yamanaka became vegan 16 years ago, she said, most people in Japan hadn’t even heard of the term “vegan.” Pronounced bi-gan, it joins a lexicon of Western loan words that have been integrated into the language with Japanese phonetics, such as ko-hii (coffee) or chi-zu (cheese). But in recent years, she said, being vegan has become a somewhat fashionable subculture — judging from social media trends and an upswing in photogenic vegan cafes, which she said get more young people interested in becoming vegan, too.

— Sachi Kitajima Mulkey and Joseph Winters

Check out the full article for more insight into cultural barriers that stand in the way of veganism’s spread in Japan, and how advocates are pushing back.

More exposure

• Read: about the growth of veganism in another meat- and dairy-loving country: the U.K. (The Guardian)
• Read: a story about the tradition of eating wasps in Kushihara, a Japanese mountain village (Splendid Table)
• Read: a diary-style article from a writer who spent a week sampling faux-fish products (Grist)
• Read: a guide to the best vegan sushi spots in Tokyo (Tokyo Weekender)

A parting shot

While Mulkey was in Japan visiting her family, she got to sample a number of vegan treats in Kyoto. Here’s a shot of soy milk-based ramen at Mumokuteki, a natural lifestyle store with a vegan cafe. Mulkey described the ramen as “so, so yum.”

IMAGE CREDITS

Vision: Amelia K. Bates / Grist

Spotlight: Sachi Kitajima Mulkey / Grist

Parting shot: Sachi Kitajima Mulkey / Grist

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Veganism has deep roots in Japan’s history. It’s beginning to resurface. on Feb 5, 2025.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Claire Elise Thompson.

As further proof of complete failure for privileged class expressions of our great democracy Trump was even outspent in the electoral market which is where Americans shop for the illusion of some constitutional or biblical expression of a supposed gift to the world brought by Europeans who savagely attacked indigenous people here hundreds of years ago and transformed earth into real estate while introducing freedom and other good stuff even before Israelis thought of it hundreds of years later in Palestine. Rejoice, be glad and continue taking drugs, spending trillions to brutalize humanity and destroy nature while the ruling class continues teaching us that swallowing sewage is a form of healthy dining and having our heads filled with mental puss makes us worthy of therapy.

While the USA sinks more deeply in a global political economic cesspool and the rest of the world rises and moves in the direction of a global and cooperative real democracy, a relative handful of capitalist commissars here and in colonial corporations desperately try to hang on to power and in so doing threaten the entire human race and not just their tiny if incredibly wealthy ruling class and are bringing us closer to ruin. The professional servant class which has served as supporting capital in its fading time now assumes even more desperate behavior and the media air contaminated by consciousness controllers becoming more dimwitted and murderous with each passing second threaten to speed up messages of blatant idiocy that may serve to make Trump look less ignorant if that is possible.

Those who speak of losing something that has never existed since euros got here – democracy – strengthen the foolish idea that voting assures the existence of majority rule no matter the fact that in America and as in most other market electoral arenas those with the most heavily financed products/candidates usually win though this case was a slight blip on the blurred screen of a degenerate form of democracy to make the one by which Nazis took power in Germany look close to ideal. While a popular comic-book formed conception might be that evil Germans took control of the country by marching in with guns and taking over that is fiction. They were elected to power in a more democratic, though hardly ideal, form of elections in which achieving a minority vote got you at least some power while here in narcoleptic-inspired America less than 50 percent gets you booted out with nothing.

But lest we become more deeply submerged in oceans of blather about fascism and not notice that millions of us live under it without it being given that name we might consider that millions of Americans are poor, without health care and hundreds of thousands of us have no place to live. This while we spend trillions on war and mass murder and tens of billions on the health and well being of our pets with many of us sleeping in their warm embrace due to lack of any human intimacy in our lives. Meanwhile Trump and many of his innocent supporters speak of Democratic Party members as Marxists thereby proving that he and they have no idea of Grouch’s thoughts on humor let alone Karl’s on political economics. But whether motivated by biblical tales of chosen people and virgin births or modern and less believable nonsense about celebrities and other influencers who make Trump seem almost thoughtful by comparison, news from the material world is that capitalist economics are destroying nature in all its forms and while the obliteration of air, water and other stuff in existence from long before we came along, the threat of nuclear destruction of all of us all at once grows with each new expression of mindless private profit seeking with more murderous policies and weapons that bring billions of dollars to some while offering to destroy billions of lives among the enormous majority of humanity made to absorb the murderous bill until such time as we create real global democracy and end the system before it destroys all of us.

Most recently the outgoing president, who has long left any hint of intelligence for the dung heap, warmly offered Ukraine the use of weapons to attack Russia and now, as often, we have to rely on Putin’s humanity and intelligence not to unleash nuclear weapons on the USA when such weapons are used on Russia. But, of course, good and decent Americans are reduced to claiming Putin is horny for world domination while the U.S. has hundreds of military bases surrounding Russia, China and much of the world but these are all about democracy and peace. Of course, and rapists are only concerned that their victims not be sexually frustrated. Trump’s election may well be another sign of the end of American imperial domination of the planet and whether his blatant ignorance and honesty assure positive or negative result, America and the planet will possibly benefit much more than great masses of us were lead to believe.

Meanwhile the usual suspects will fill the air with mental smog accusing any and all of fascism, genocide and even newer synonyms for whatever has been going on before our eyes while they learned memes and performed mimes and qualified as capital’s professional class of well paid servants whose checks may begin bouncing sooner than 2025 gets old.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Frank Scott.

The fund’s strongest advocates — small island nations, African countries, and climate justice activists — intended it to help the poor nations that have been hit hardest by climate change pay for the many billions of dollars in damage that their negligible carbon emissions did little to cause. They argued that early-industrializing wealthy countries, which have emitted the lion’s share of carbon emissions historically, have a moral imperative to support developing nations coping with the effects of climate change.

But in the nearly 10 months since the UN conference, the fund hasn’t raised much beyond the initial $650 million pledge, save for an $11.7 million pledge from Austria and a $7 million announcement from South Korea. Other wealthy nations have stayed largely silent on the subject of additional donations to the fund. And now that the spotlight is turning to other high-profile climate finance issues at COP29, the upcoming UN climate conference in Baku, Azerbaijan, loss and damage advocates are starting to conclude that additional pledges to the fund are unlikely for now.

“A lot of us hoped that more countries would have come in,” said Liane Schalatek, the associate director of the Washington, DC, office of the Heinrich Böll Foundation, an independent organization associated with the German Green Party. “A lot of the developed countries take a kind of wait-and-see approach.”

The nearly $680 million total pledged to the loss and damage is a tiny fraction of what’s needed to cover the costs that the developing world has incurred due to climate change it largely did not cause: Researchers have estimated climate-induced loss and damage will cost as much as $580 billion per year by 2030. 

The fact that loss and damage pledges have dried up since COP28 does not mean that progress toward getting money to countries in need has totally stalled, however. Representatives of both developed and developing countries have agreed on some contentious decisions required to make the fund a reality: the nomination of board members to oversee the fund, the choice of the World Bank as the fund’s institutional home, and the selection of the Philippines as the fund’s host country, which is required to give the board the legal capacity to work with the World Bank. Most recently, the board hired Ibrahima Cheikh Diong, a Senegalese and American national with experience working at public and private banks, as the executive director of the fund. 

“Procedurally, this is quite a feat,” said Schalatek. “The board has actually been able [to fulfill its duties] and that was honestly quite doubtful.”

Still, several key questions remain open, including the size of the fund and how it will solicit additional resources. The loss and damage fund is just one of a handful of environmental funds hosted by the World Bank, and each has a different process for raising capital. The Global Environment Facility, which funds a range of environmental projects tackling biodiversity loss, pollution, and climate change, is replenished every four years. During the replenishment cycle, the World Bank actively fundraises, urging donors to pledge funds. Other climate funds hosted by the World Bank, however, have no replenishment schedule. In those cases, fund managers continuously fundraise in annual cycles in an attempt to secure resources for the following year. 

The vague wording of the loss and damage agreement appears to split the difference between these approaches: In the decision finalizing the loss and damage fund, UN member countries agreed that the fund “will have a periodic replenishment every four years and will maintain the flexibility to receive financial inputs on an ongoing basis.” While this appears to provide maximum fundraising flexibility, it could also give donor countries cover for sitting on the sidelines for years at a time — especially given that no agreement has been reached on the total dollar amount required by the loss and damage fund, and that all pledges are voluntary.

Schalatek is particularly disappointed that wealthy countries such as the United States and Japan — which initially pledged just $17.5 million and $10 million, respectively — haven’t announced additional pledges considering the size of their economies and relative responsibility for causing climate change, given their high per capita carbon emissions.

“$680 million does not last that long,” said Schalatek.

At COP29 next month, countries will be jostling over an overarching climate finance goal that will encompass not just loss and damage payments, but also adaptation funding and financing for the energy transition. Decarbonizing the world will take nearly unfathomable amounts of money, and wealthy countries are again expected to fork over funds to help developing countries make the shift to cleaner energy sources. Developed countries have so far largely resisted including finance goals for loss and damage in conversations about what this total dollar figure — which is known as the New Collective Quantified Goal — should be. 

Despite these open questions, the loss and damage fund is still expected to start doling out money next year. Schalatek said the board need not wait to have all its operational procedures in place before it begins disbursing funds. For instance, the fund is already capable of providing direct support to the national budgets of countries that need it, instead of trying to route the funds to specific communities or organizations, which would likely require more bureaucratic procedures to be agreed upon.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline A landmark fund for climate reparations is beginning to languish on Oct 1, 2024.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Naveena Sadasivam.

He misses the point as usual. The warrants have nothing to do with that. They are about bringing those wanted for the most grievous war crimes to justice.

Prime minister Rishi Sunak then said that the move was “deeply unhelpful”, adding: “There is no moral equivalence between a democratic state exercising its lawful right to self defence and the terrorist group Hamas.”

Even Biden was singing off the same hymn-sheet saying there is “no equivalence – none – between Israel and Hamas” and that what’s happening in Gaza is not genocide…. a hymn of praise for Israel almost.

Of course there is no moral equivalence. As the world has witnessed, Israel’s crimes are a thousand times greater than Hamas’s and are allowed to continue without let-up, courtesy of the US and UK who dutifully carry on supplying the ordnance and weaponry. It still hasn’t penetrated enough Washington and Whitehall skulls that it is the Palestinian resistance who are exercising their lawful right to self-defence – using “armed struggle” if necessary – against Israel’s illegal military occupation, brutal 17-year blockade and decades-long murderous oppression (UN Resolutions 37/43 and 3246).

Furthermore Hamas are just as legitimate as any Israeli administration having been democratically elected under the scrutiny of international observers, a result immediately rejected at the time by the UK, Israel and the US because it didn’t happen to suit their evil purpose in the Middle East.

And why are Hamas proscribed as a terrorist organisation in the UK? Only because a group of Israel’s pimps and stooges among Westminster’s political elite say so. It would be interesting to take a vote on what the people who put them there actually think, now they know the horrendous situation in Gaza and the West Bank and the long history leading up to it. Wouldn’t it be more appropriate to proscribe Likud, Netyanyahu’s terrorist party?

Cameron also claims it’s a mistake to draw moral equivalence because Palestine is not regarded as a state. Again, he isn’t paying attention. 146 of the 193 UN member states recognise Palestine, including Ireland, Norway and Spain who announced recognition just a few days ago. 11 of these are EU states, so what is Cameron drivelling about?

Fortunately, a cross-party group of 105 MPs and Lords has called on the UK Government “to do all it can to support the International Criminal Court” after Prime Minister Sunak’s remark that its decision to seek arrest warrants for Israeli and Hamas leaders was “deeply unhelpful”. In a letter addressed to Foreign Secretary Cameron they say “there is mounting evidence that Israel has committed clear and obvious violations of international law in Gaza and we strongly believe that those responsible must be held to account”. They call on the Government “to take a clear stance against any attempts to intimidate an independent and impartial international court…. The Court, its Prosecutor, and all its staff must be free to pursue justice without fear or favour”.

One of the organisers, MP Richard Burgon, said: “At every stage, our Government has failed to fulfil its moral duty to do everything it can to help save lives and prevent suffering in Gaza. It must not fail again. It must back the ICC in ensuring that there is no impunity for war crimes and it must stand up to those seeking to impede justice.”

Almost straightaway Sunak, in a surprise move, called a general election for 4 July. This means that MPs immediately cease being MPs but ministers continue in office until a new government is formed. For the next 6 weeks, then, Sunak’s crew continue to rule without being accountable to the House of Commons and could do a lot of damage. So this is a doubly dangerous time for our nation.

Meanwhile Cameron and his ignorant friends seem to think the Gaza war only started as recently as October 7. He plays up the release of 134 Israeli hostages when, on October 6 Israel was holding 5,200 Palestinians captive, including at least 170 children, and since then has abducted some 7,350 more. Why do we never hear from Cameron about the Palestinian hostages/prisoners?

And how many Palestinians had Israel killed before October 7? Answer: 10,651 slaughtered by Israel in the 23 years up to Oct 7, including 2,270 children and 656 women (Israel’s B’Tselem figures). That’s 460 a year. In that period Israel was exterminating Palestinians at the rate of 8:1 and children at the rate of 16:1.

Israel’s friends in the West like to think of Netanyahu as the leader of a Western style democracy that shares our values. Actually he’s the head of a nasty little ethnocracy with vicious apartheid policies and a 76-year record of terrorism, pursuing an extended military campaign aimed at occupying and annexing another people’s lands and resources, and showing no respect whatsoever for British values or international norms of behaviour.

So, putting aside for a moment our dislike of Hamas’s methods, shouldn’t we be asking our politicians to explain why exactly Hamas must be eliminated and the Palestinians’ homeland pulverised in the process, seeing as it is they who are under illegally military occupation and they who have the ultimate right of self-defence?

It’s easy to see where Cameron is coming from. After 3 months of genocide in Gaza, he denied Israel had broken international law. He also said it was “nonsense” to suggest that Israel intended to commit genocide. Asked if he thought Israel had a case to answer at the ICJ, he said: “No, I absolutely don’t. I think the South African action is wrong, I think it is unhelpful, I think it shouldn’t be happening…. I take the view that Israel is acting in self-defence after the appalling attack on October 7. But even if you take a different view to my view, to look at Israel, a democracy, a country with the rule of law, a country with armed forces that are committed to obeying the rule of law, to say that that country, that leadership, that armed forces, that they have intent to commit genocide, I think that is nonsense, I think that is wrong.”

So says this self-declared zionist and key stooge for Israel, one of many at Westminster who are desperate to maintain the shady US/UK-Israel alliance. Do Sunak, Cameron & co really want victory for the genocidists? It seems they do. Because they’ve pledged their undying adoration and support for that rotten apartheid regime and now the world has seen it for what it really is and their position is turning sour.

On the face of it the Hamas trio — Haniyeh, Sinwar and Dief — with competent legal representation seem likely to survive the legal process. And although many are questioning why arrest warrants are being considered for them at the same time as the mega-maniac Netanyahu there is reason to hope that, if they do come to trial, a lot of bad stuff about Israel, the US and the UK will come out. The world will then be much wiser and the ‘axis of evil’ behind it all will collapse under the weight of its own lunacy.

The UK general election will likely rid us of Sunak, Cameron and the rest of the Tory nitwits. But sitting in the waiting room is Labour’s Keir Starmer, another Israel stooge. Yes, the zionists have all angles covered.

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

But this well-worn debate may not actually be the one that determines the future of nuclear energy in the United States. More decisive is the unresolved question of whether the U.S. actually has the practical ability to build new nuclear plants at all.

The answer to this question may hinge on what happens in the wake of a construction project that’s reaching completion near Waynesboro, Georgia, where the second in a pair of new nuclear reactors is scheduled to enter commercial service at some point over the next three months. Each reactor has the capacity to power half a million homes and businesses annually without emitting greenhouse gases; despite this, they are hardly viewed as an unambiguous success.

The construction of those reactors — Units 3 and 4 of Plant Vogtle, the first U.S. nuclear reactors built from scratch in decades — was a years-long saga whose delays and budget overruns drove the giant nuclear company Westinghouse into bankruptcy. The reactors, first approved by Georgia regulators in 2009, are reckoned to be the most expensive infrastructure project of any kind in American history, at a total cost of $35 billion. That’s nearly double the original budget of the project, which is set to cross the finish line seven years behind schedule. Much of the cost was ultimately borne by Georgia residents, whose energy bills have ballooned to pay off a portion of the overruns.

“It’s a simple fact that Vogtle had disastrous cost overruns and delays, and you have to stare that fact in the face,” said John Parsons, a researcher at MIT’s Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research. “It’s also possible that nuclear, if we can do it, is a valuable contribution to the system, but we need to learn how to do it cheaper than we’ve done so far. I would hate to throw away all the gains that we’ve learned from doing it.”

What kind of learning experience Vogtle ends up being may well come down to how it’s interpreted by the state and regional utility officials who approve new sources of power. Many are likely looking at the monumental expense and difficulty of building Vogtle and thinking they’d be foolish to try their hand at new nuclear power. Other energy officials, however, say those delays and overruns are the reason they’d be foolish not to.

The case for building more nuclear plants in the wake of Vogtle rests on a simple argument: Because the new reactors were the first newly built American nuclear plant to come online since 1993 — and the first to begin construction since the 1970s — many of their challenges were either unique to a first-of-a-kind reactor design or a result of the loss of industrial knowledge since the decline of the nuclear industry. Therefore, they might not necessarily recur in a future project, which could take advantage of the finalized reactor design and the know-how that had to be generated from scratch during Vogtle.

The Biden administration, which sees nuclear energy as an important component of its plan to get the U.S. to net-zero emissions by 2050, is betting that Vogtle can pave the way for a rebirth of the nuclear industry.

The generational gap between Vogtle and previous nuclear projects meant that the workforce and supply chain needed to build a nuclear plant had to be rebuilt for the new units. Their construction involved training some 13,000 technicians, according to Julie Kozeracki, a senior advisor at the Department of Energy’s Loan Programs Office, a once-obscure agency that has become one of the federal government’s main conduits for climate investments under the Biden administration.

When Vogtle’s Units 3 and 4 were approved by Georgia regulators in 2009, the reactor model, known as an AP1000, had never before been built. (It was Westinghouse’s flagship model, combining new “passive safety” features, which allow shutdown without human intervention in the case of an emergency, with massive generation capacity.) It later emerged that the reactor’s developer, Westinghouse, had not even fully completed the design before starting construction, causing a significant share of the project’s costly setbacks. While that was bad news for Georgians, it could mean a smoother path ahead for future reactors.

“In the course of building Vogtle,” Kozeracki told Grist, “we have now addressed three of the biggest challenges: the incomplete design, the immature supply chain, and the untrained workforce.”

These factors helped bring down the cost of Unit 4 by 30 percent compared to Unit 3, Kozeracki said, adding that a hypothetical Unit 5 would be even cheaper. Furthermore, as a result of the Inflation Reduction Act, the climate-focused law that Congress passed in 2022, any new nuclear reactor would receive somewhere between 30 and 50 percent of its costs back in tax credits.

“We should be capitalizing on those hard-won lessons and building 10 or 20 more [AP1000s],” Kozeracki said.

Despite this optimism, however, no U.S. utility is currently building a new nuclear reactor. Part of the reason may be that it’s already too late to capitalize on the advantages of the Vogtle experience. For one thing, the 13,000 workers who assembled Vogtle may not all be available for a new gig.

“The trained workforce is a rapidly depreciating asset for the nuclear industry,” said John Quiggin, an economist at the University of Queensland, in an email. “Once the job is finished, workers move on or retire, subcontractors go out of business, the engineering and design groups are broken up and their tacit knowledge is lost. If a new project is started in, say, five years, it will have to do most of its recruiting from scratch.”

In Quiggin’s view, the opportunity has already passed, as much of the physical construction at Plant Vogtle happened years ago. “You can’t go back and say, ‘Look, we’ve got the team, we know what we did wrong last time, we’re going to do it better this time.’ It’ll be a totally new group of people doing it,” he said in an interview.

“It would have been better to start five years ago,” Kozeracki acknowledged. “But the second best time is right now.”

The federal government has put money on the table, but whether a new nuclear plant will actually get built is ultimately in the hands of a constellation of players including the nuclear industry, utility companies, and utility commissions, who would have to work together and overcome their current stalemate. None of them are clamoring to shoulder the risk of taking the first step.

“Everybody’s hoping that someone else would solve the cost problem,” Parsons said.

Utility commissioners — the state-level officials, often in elected positions, whose approval would be needed to site a future reactor — are wary of being blamed for passing on potential cost overruns to ratepayers.

“It would just be surprising for me if a Public Service Commission signed off on another AP1000 given how badly the last ones went,” said Matt Bowen, a researcher at Columbia’s Center on Global Energy Policy.

If more nuclear energy is built soon, it will most likely be in the Southeast, where power companies operate under what’s called a “vertically integrated monopoly” profit model, meaning they do not participate in wholesale energy markets but rather generate energy themselves and then sell it directly to customers.

Under this model, utilities are guaranteed a return on any investment their shareholders make, which is paid for by their customers at rates set by the state-level utility commissions. Many ratepayer advocates accuse these commissions of effectively rubber-stamping utility demands as a result of regulatory capture — at the expense of customers who are unable to choose a different power company. But this same dynamic means that vertically integrated utilities are in the best position to build something as expensive as a nuclear plant.

“Their primary business model is capital expenditure,” explained Tyler Norris, a Duke University doctoral fellow and former special advisor at the Department of Energy. “The way they make money is by investing capital, primarily in generation capacity or transmission upgrades. They have an inherent incentive to spend money; they make more money the more they spend.”

Under the regulatory compact between states and utilities, it is utility commissioners’ job to make sure those expenditures (which ultimately, after all, come from ratepayer money) are “just and reasonable.”

Tim Echols, a member of Georgia’s Public Service Commission, said in an email that he would not approve another nuclear reactor in Georgia in the absence of “some sort of federal financial backstop” to protect against the risk of a repeat of the Vogtle experience.

“I haven’t seen any other [utility commission] raise their hand to build a nuclear reactor,” added Echols, who is also the chair of a committee on nuclear issues at the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners.

Kozeracki, of the Department of Energy, said that private-sector nuclear industry players have also asked for such a backstop in the form of a federal cost overrun insurance program, which would require Congressional legislation. However, she added that it might be incumbent upon industry figures to explain just how much more capacity to build such a backstop would give them.

“The real piece that’s missing there is a compelling plan from the nuclear industry for what they would deliver with something like a cost overrun insurance program,” Kozeracki said.

There is an ongoing debate among nuclear advocates about whether a different type of reactor, such as the so-called small modular reactors currently in development, is a more viable solution than the AP1000. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has issued a permit for the Tennessee Valley Authority to build one such reactor. But the excitement around SMRs has somewhat waned since the cancellation of a much-anticipated project in November. Experts told Grist that some, but not all, of the knowledge and lessons gained through the Vogtle experience would carry over to a new project that was not an AP1000.

The search for new nuclear solutions is coinciding with what could be a dramatic juncture in the history of American energy planning. In recent months, utilities across the country have reported anticipating massive increases in demand for electricity, which had remained relatively flat for two decades. A December report from the consulting firm Grid Strategies found that grid planners’ five-year forecasts for the growth of their power loads had nearly doubled over the last year.

The growth in demand is largely attributed to a mix of new data centers, many of which will power artificial intelligence, as well as new industrial sites.

For James Krellenstein, director of the consulting firm GHS Climate, this new load growth “dramatically changes the calculus in favor of nuclear.” 

“Facing both the need to decrease carbon emissions while having to increase the amount of power that we need, nuclear is a natural technology for that challenge,” Krellenstein added.

So far, however, utilities have responded instead by seeking to rapidly expand fossil fuel generation — in particular, by building new natural gas plants.

“We’re seeing utilities put forward very large gas expansion plans, and this is eating nuclear’s lunch,” said Duke University’s Norris.

Kozeracki characterized the utilities’ plans as shortsighted. “I recognize that natural gas may feel like the easy button, but I should hope that folks are able to account for the cost and benefits of decarbonizing resiliently and make choices their children will be proud of, which I think would be starting new nuclear units now,” she said.

Norris urged caution in accepting the largest estimates of forecasted electricity demand. “Utilities have every incentive to characterize a worst case scenario here for extreme load growth, and not seriously consider demand response solutions, so that they can justify very large capital expenditures for capacity,” Norris said. “That’s why it’s so important that the clean energy and climate community be very engaged in these state level resource planning processes.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Georgia’s Vogtle plant could herald the beginning — or end — of a new nuclear era on Apr 8, 2024.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Gautama Mehta.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Allen Forrest.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Allen Forrest.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by Pacific Media Watch.

The post Preparing for War Is the Beginning: An Early Warning for Northeast Asia appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Dae-Han Song.

As Hurricane Idalia left a wake of destruction Wednesday, President Joe Biden said, “I don’t think anybody can deny the impact of the climate crisis anymore.” Climate activist and scientist Peter Kalmus calls for Biden to declare a climate emergency in order to unleash the government’s ability to transition away from fossil fuels. “The public just doesn’t understand, in my opinion, what a deep emergency we are in,” says Kalmus. “This is the merest beginning of what we’re going to see in coming years.” Kalmus blasts the fossil fuel industry for manipulating politics through campaign contributions, and GOP presidential candidates for misleading the public about climate science. “As a parent, as a citizen and as a scientist, I find it appalling and disgusting,” declares Kalmus. “I can’t mince words anymore.”

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

Image by Candice Seplow.

Unless you are a peace activist, or work for the Pentagon or a weapons contractor, you are likely (blissfully) unaware Congress is about to take up the National Defense Authorization Act, the massive policy bill on Pentagon spending and related military and foreign policy functions. It will likely get nearly $900 billion this year while social programs get short shrift.

Among more than 1500 proposed amendments to the bill on various issues are some that seem a bit oriented toward peace, including ending US support for the Saudi-led war in Yemen (and fully supporting the nascent peace process), assessing nuclear weapons systems and policy, and limiting US weapons transfers.

An amendment offered by US Rep. Warren Davidson (R-OH) could offer a way out of the disastrous war in Ukraine, for the Biden Administration, Russia, and Ukraine itself.

The amendment is relatively modest and straight-forward, requiring the Biden Administration to report to Congress on its strategy, objectives, projected costs, and perhaps most importantly, its diplomatic engagement (or lack thereof) to hasten the end of the war.

The timing of Davidson’s amendment may be fortuitous, coming on the heels of a July 6 NBC News report on previously secret, “track two” talks between former US government officials and Russians including Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov. It is also very likely official, “track one” government-to-government talks are also ongoing but not publicly acknowledged. At the least, the amendment is a good governance, Congressional oversight, checks and balances measure on the Executive Branch, which wields enormous power over military and foreign policy.

It could be more than that, if it passes Congress, becomes law, and gets the attention it deserves. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is illegal, and a calamity for both countries.

The U.S. and other outside powers, while they are far from neutral, disinterested parties, may be needed to bring their influence to bear on ending the war. Over the last several decades, Congress, representing the American people, has become entirely too deferential to presidential power on war and peace issues. This amendment would add to a growing trend to correct that imbalance.

The Biden Administration, for its part, has to know the US cannot endlessly write blank checks to Ukraine for weaponry. Congress at some point will tighten the purse strings. Also, President Biden presumably would like to run for re-election free of this headache, understandably preferring to focus on the economy and improving the lives of people in this country.

I won’t attempt to speculate on the motivations or self-interest of the Ukrainian or Russian governments. But for the people of those two countries, so closely linked by history and culture, this war, which looks to be an intractable stalemate, can’t end soon enough, with negotiations to settle all manner of issues to be determined by the parties with whatever outside help is required.

Every day, people dying on both sides is a needless tragedy. The Davidson Amendment could be a turning point to end this madness. It deserves strong, bipartisan support.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Kevin Martin.

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One morning in September 2017, Judge Christopher Plourd opened an unusual hearing at the Imperial County Superior Courthouse, a half-hour north of the California-Mexico border. It involved three illegal drug possession cases that were unrelated to one another.

Each of the cases had relied on the results of chemical field test kits used by corrections officers at nearby state prisons. The kits indicated crumbs and shreds of paper that guards found on the inmates contained heroin and amphetamine. But a state forensic laboratory later analyzed the debris utilizing a far more reliable test and found no trace of illegal drugs. The defendants were factually innocent.

Rather than simply close the cases, defense attorneys asked the court to determine whether the NIK Public Safety brand field tests used in California’s prisons were too unreliable to show to grand jurors. In effect, they put on trial the evidence most commonly used to secure convictions in drug cases in the U.S.

Plourd ruled in early 2018 that the test kit “does not meet a scientific admissibility standard” and therefore “does not support the grand jury indictment.”

In other words, the tests were guilty.

The Imperial County cases are believed to be the first time a judge blocked field tests from contributing to indictments. In the years since, defendants and inmates in multiple states have scored additional legal victories against agencies using the kits and the companies selling them.

“For years, these tests have had this unjustified scientific veneer,” said Des Walsh, founder of the Roadside Drug Test Innocence Alliance, which advocates for the use of more accurate testing technology. “Finally, we believe the tide is turning with this dawning awareness of the unacceptably high rate of false positives.”

In a 2016 series of stories, ProPublica documented law enforcement’s widespread use of field tests to make arrests and secure convictions despite serious flaws. No government agency regulates their use. The officers who perform the tests to make arrests on the street often have little or no training in their use.

Since then, the new court rulings have contributed to a growing movement to change the way drug cases are prosecuted in America. Courts across the country have long known that field tests are error prone and require forensic laboratories to confirm the results for jury trials. However, nearly all drug convictions in the U.S. come by plea deals during initial hearings, where chemical kits are the primary evidence of guilt.

Courts have overturned 131 drug convictions in the past 10 years after laboratory analysis determined the alleged drugs were legal substances, according to a database maintained by the National Registry of Exonerations. A large majority of those wrongful convictions originated in Harris County, Texas, where the crime lab analyzed its backlog of suspected drugs from closed cases and discovered the evidence in hundreds of convictions did not contain drugs. The defendants in those cases had pleaded guilty at preliminary hearings.

The tests are small plastic pouches holding vials of chemicals. They’re cheap, roughly $2 apiece, and easy to use. Officers open the pouch and add the substance to be tested. The tests are designed to produce specific colors when mixed with drugs like heroin, cocaine or methamphetamine. But dozens of items, including foods and household cleaners, trigger similar reactions.

During the Imperial County hearing, an executive at the Safariland Group, the nation’s largest field test manufacturer, testified the company keeps a list of more than 50 legal substances that cause positive results. Court records show chocolate sometimes turns the liquid a similar shade of green as heroin in the NIK kits.

Safariland Group did not respond to a request for comment.

More evidence of the tests’ inaccuracy came in October 2021, when former inmates filed a class-action lawsuit against the Massachusetts Department of Correction. The prisons used test kits on all incoming mail, including letters from attorneys. When correspondence tested positive, inmates were sometimes put in solitary confinement and lost eligibility for parole. The lawsuit alleged that the prison system’s use of field tests violated the inmates’ right to due process.

Court records show that between August 2019 and August 2020, lab analysis found that 38% of the inmate mail that tested positive did not contain the alleged drug. Shortly after the inmates filed their lawsuit, Suffolk County Superior Court Judge Brian David ordered the Correction Department to immediately stop using the chemical kits until the litigation was finished.

In the order, David characterized the NARK II brand kits used in Massachusetts’ prisons as “arbitrary and unlawful guesswork.”

The inmates are also suing Sirchie Acquisition Co., manufacturer of the NARK II kits, and Premier Biotech, a retailer that sells them, in federal court for negligence, alleging the companies misrepresented the kits’ risk of false positives and provided inaccurate instructions to the state prisons. In September, a federal judge ruled that field test sellers can potentially be held liable for harm caused by erroneous results. Both of the lawsuits are ongoing.

Sirchie did not respond to ProPublica’s request for comment. Sirchie, Premier Biotech and the Massachusetts Correction Department have denied the inmates’ claims in court records.

Compounding field tests’ inherent flaws, police officers and prison guards rarely understand how the kits work, according to court records and interviews.

During the hearing in Imperial County, multiple guards testified about the training they received on the field tests and how they described the results to grand jurors. David Eustaquio, an officer with the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, told the court he had used the chemical kits more than 200 times during his career, according to transcripts. He said he’d never had to explain the results beyond saying the color change meant the test was positive for an illegal drug.

“Do you know what the accuracy rate is for these NIK tests?” Kelly Jafine, an Imperial County deputy public defender, asked Eustaquio.

“No, I do not,” he said.

Jafine then asked if the prison had taught him about false positive results during training on the chemical kits.

“No,” Eustaquio answered, “I was not.”

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This content originally appeared on Articles and Investigations - ProPublica and was authored by by Ryan Gabrielson.

The Tennessee Republican Party waited less than 24 hours to start fundraising off the expulsion of two progressive lawmakers from the state House—openly bragging Friday about what critics have called a blatantly anti-democratic move that shows the party's growing authoritarianism.

State Reps. Justin Jones (D-52) and Justin Pearson (D-86) are two of three Democrats who joined protesters in interrupting a floor session on March 30 to demand gun control in the wake of last week's deadly school shooting in Nashville. Tennessee House Republicans on Thursday voted to expel both Black men from the chamber while a vote to expel their colleague Rep. Gloria Johnson (D-13), who is white, fell short.

In a Friday fundraising email, the Tennessee GOP said: "Their adolescence and immature behavior brought dishonor to the Tennessee General Assembly as they admitted to knowingly breaking the rules. Actions have consequences, and we applaud House Republicans for having the conviction to protect the rules, the laws, and the prestige of the State of Tennessee."

"Our fight is just beginning," the email concludes.

Progressives members of Congress had already denounced Tennessee Republicans for engaging in what U.S. Rep. Summer Lee (D-Pa.) called "straight-up fascism in its ugliest, most racist form" before the fundraising email emerged.

Now, the Tennessee GOP is portraying the state's first partisan expulsion since the Civil War era as upholding "the rule of law" and is trying to capitalize on it.

Slate's Alexander Sammon warned that Thursday's vote "is a chilling portent of the future of Republican governance and the state of democracy nationwide."

"While Republicans have focused on gerrymandering and voter suppression as the primary prongs of their assault on democracy (as well as the occasional insurrection attempt)," he noted, "the willingness to expel democratically elected Democrats for minor-verging-on-made-up infractions portends a terrifying new development."

In a Friday statement, Public Citizen president Robert Weissman condemned Tennessee House Republicans for "summarily ending" the current terms of Jones and Pearson and "depriving their constituents of duly elected representation."

"This was a racist and disproportionate act of retaliation against legislators who had joined demonstrators chanting in the chamber, in protest of Republican refusal to adopt commonsense gun control measures in the wake of the March 27 school shooting in Nashville," said Weissman, who called Tennessee Republicans' move "flagrantly anti-democratic."

"American democracy is in a profound crisis... What just happened in Tennessee is yet another reminder of the perilous state of our country."

"In modern American history, expulsion of state legislators is very rare—not just in Tennessee but throughout the United States, and rightfully so. Legislators should expel elected officials only in extreme circumstances, not over policy differences or impingements on decorum," he continued. "Legislative supermajorities already have enormous power; when they wield that power to strip away even the offices of the minority, they are treading on very dangerous ground."

As Weissman pointed out, "Some Tennessee legislators—and a lot of MAGA commentary online—are un-ironically calling the state representatives' chanting an 'insurrection.'"

"Of course, the United States did witness a real insurrection on January 6, 2021," said Weissman. "Not one member of Congress was expelled for promoting [former President] Donald Trump's patently false claims that the 2020 election was 'stolen' from him or for supporting the attempted coup carried out at Trump's behest. Only 10 Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives would vote to impeach Trump in the immediate aftermath of the insurrection, and only two of them were able to get re-elected."

"American democracy is in a profound crisis, riven by lies, right-wing extremism, conspiratorial thinking, and subservience to corporate and special interests, and racism," Weissman stressed. "What just happened in Tennessee is yet another reminder of the perilous state of our country."

Nevertheless, he continued, "a hopeful future is also a visible feature of our nation, demonstrated in the courage and principle of the targeted representatives... and the energy and commitment of the protesters—overwhelmingly young people—demanding justice and commonsense gun regulation."

"This is a powerful reminder that democracy does not die easily," Weissman added. "Indeed, the energy in Tennessee will help inspire and power the nationwide movement not just to defend but to expand and deepen our democracy, and we are committed to rising to the occasion, and being part of this movement to make our country a more just and equitable place for all."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Kenny Stancil.

A leading climate action group on Monday published a report revealing that the 94 clean energy projects announced since U.S. President Joe Biden signed the Inflation Reduction Act into law last August are set to create more than 100,000 green jobs.

Climate Power—which published the report as part of a new six-figure national ad campaign touting the growing green economy—said that since the IRA became law without any Republican support last year, "companies are racing forward with massive investments to build our clean energy future."

"New manufacturing in wind, solar, batteries, and electric vehicles—along with storage projects across the country—mean new, good-paying jobs for hard-working Americans," the group continued. "In the six months since the landmark climate and clean energy investments became law, clean energy companies have announced more than 100,000 new clean energy jobs for electricians, mechanics, construction workers, technicians, support staff, and many others."

"As the largest U.S. investment in clean energy and climate in history, this national clean energy plan will continue to reshape and recharge our economy for many decades to come," Climate Power added.

While green groups have generally praised the IRA's historic $369 billion investment in renewable energy production and innovation, activists have condemned provisions including fossil fuel tax credits and mandatory lease sales on public lands and at sea.

The 94 new clean energy projects in the Climate Power report—which are spread across 31 states and have a combined investment value of $89.5 billion—include:

Forty new battery manufacturing sites in places like Van Buren Township, Michigan; Tucson, Arizona; and Florence County, South Carolina. So far, 22 companies have announced plans for new or expanded electric vehicle manufacturing in Pryor, Oklahoma; Montgomery, Alabama; Highland Park, Michigan—and more. A further 24 companies shared plans to expand wind and solar manufacturing in cities including Pueblo, Colorado; Perrysburg, Ohio; and Georgetown, Texas. The majority of the projects are in seven states—Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Ohio, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Texas.

"Thanks to President Biden's affordable clean energy plan, businesses are investing in manufacturing like never before, and planning to create good-paying jobs in every corner of the country," Climate Power executive director Lori Lodes said in a statement.

"This is only the beginning—we're months after the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act and we're already at the precipice of a renewed manufacturing, made-in-America boom that will create opportunities for millions of Americans, all while reducing toxic emissions that harm the health and wellbeing of our communities," Lodes added.

Last month, the International Energy Agency said in a report that "the world is at the dawn of a new industrial age—the age of clean energy technology manufacturing," and that green manufacturing jobs will more than double by the end of the decade if countries worldwide live up to their climate and energy pledges—a huge "if" given that global emissions remain at record levels.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Brett Wilkins.

In early January 2023, in a tiny village in western Germany, tens of thousands of climate justice activists faced off against thousands of police in a showdown over the fate of the fossil industry in central Europe. The gigantic mobilization of means to secure the destruction of a village and the expansion of one of the world's largest open-pit coal mines—Garzweiler—in the center of Europe marks a new historical moment. To consider what happened in Lützerath as a defeat of the movement is to misunderstand history.

In Lützerath two historical forces clashed. On one side, the climate justice movement, which has been organizing for decades and since 2019 has become a global mass movement. In opposition to this was the German coal multinational RWE, backed by thousands of police coming from at least 14 German cities to defend the decisions of the German federal government and the government of North Rhine-Westphalia. More than symbolic, the battle of Lützerath was fought on the initiative of the climate justice movement to halt the extraction of 280 million tonnes of coal from beneath the devastated village.

Over the past two years, hundreds of activists have occupied the village houses. Meanwhile, the federal and state governments and RWE have negotiated and coerced the inhabitants of Lützerath, shortened to Lützi, to vacate the houses they inhabited. Earlier this year, more than 300 people set up various structures to actively resist the destruction, preventing the eviction and demolition of the houses and felling of the forest, scheduled for the 10th of January by a German court. The activists who were there, as well as others who joined in, barricaded houses, doors and windows, streets, built houses in trees, and prepared for the clash.

On the other side was not just one company, but much of the German state apparatus, put on the field in favour of the expansion of the Garzweiler mine and the fossil fuel industry. The German state mobilized thousands of police and their infrastructure from all over the country to drive out the activists and let the machines through. The German police used RWE media companies, RWE trucks, facilities and machines in their action, in a true public-private capitalist partnership. The German state spent millions of euros to secure the right to the destruction of Lützi by RWE.

At the center of the decision to destroy the village for the expansion of the coal mine is The Greens, a political party in Germany. It is part of the government of North Rhine-Westphalia in coalition with the CDU (right) and part of the German federal government in coalition with the SPD (centre-left) and the FDP (centre-right). The Vice-Chancellor and Minister of Economy and Climate Action is Robert Habeck, former leader and member of The Greens. This party's election results in 2021, with 14.8%, were achieved after the huge mobilizations for the climate in the country. The party justifies its support for the decision to destroy Lützi in order to expand Garzweiler by indicating that in this way RWE will bring forward the end of coal to 2030 instead of 2038. However, the Garzweiler expansion only means that it will burn coal faster, which actually makes the situation even worse in terms of the climate crisis.

On Wednesday, the 11th of January, rows of police on foot, on horseback, and in jeeps marched on this hamlet like an army—complete with tanks, helicopters, and water cannons—ready to fight a real enemy. In Lützi they found dozens of activists hanging from tripods in all the streets, on the roofs of houses and balanced on tree tops. The police apparatus needed climbers, but brought shields, batons, and pepper spray instead. They came looking for violence which they found only at intervals and in small clashes. Meanwhile, RWE employees were cutting down with chainsaws the trees where activists resisted, cutting down the forest to make room for more coal. They didn't stop for a moment over the next three days, with shifts of police pulling out and arresting activists one by one into the early hours of the morning. It looked like it would all be over before the weekend. It was then that they received news that there was an underground tunnel, dug by the activists, where two people—self-named Pinky and Brain—were holding out under Lützi, closer to the coal but away from the heavy hand of the police. Brute force, the thousands of police deployed, the veritable war arsenal used, and the millions of euros spent could not do it all.

Outside Lützi, the issue became huge in communication terms, with part of the German press and the far-right calling the activists "climate terrorists," while headquarters of The Greens and RWE were occupied and international solidarity actions took place in countries all over the world. A poll was conducted in Germany about keeping Lützerath, and 59% of people were in favor of saving the village and just 33% in favor of demolition.

At least 35,000 demonstrators came to Lützi on Saturday, including Greta Thunberg. Thousands of police surrounded the demonstration as it progressed while others surrounded the village. More than a thousand protesters stormed the Garzweiler mine and forced coal mining work to stop. Police made violent charges in hollering small groups, trying guerrilla tactics against the activists, although the most striking images turned out to be the arrest of Greta and a group of police officers mired in mud, crawling to try and get to their feet before a "mud monk," immune to sinking. The police managed to prevent the demonstrators from "recapturing Lützerath," but needed to use all sorts of means to do so. In the following days, the Ende Gelaende coalition stormed the Garzweiler mine and forced coal mining to stop numerous times.

Only on January 16th did Pinky and Brain came out of the tunnel under Lützi, of their own volition, as the police had not been able to remove them. On the 23rd the police and RWE declared the village evicted.

Lützerath is at this moment razed to the ground. Next to it, the coal mine that will begin to engulf it looks like the surface of the moon, a territory unrecoverable for thousands of years. This was the achievement of the alliance formed between fossil capital and the German state.

The arrest of hundreds of activists and the expected sentencing of some of them to prison terms will be the institutional steps that follow. But something essential changed with the battle of Lützerath. The massive mobilization and use of state resources to ensure continued destruction was deemed necessary. And it will be much more so as the climate crisis worsens.

In the UK, draconian new laws against the right to strike and on political demonstrations have been passed in an effort to stop campaigners with Just Stop Oil, Insulate Britain, the remnants of Extinction Rebellion, and the strong wave of strikes. Climate activists in several countries in Europe are being preventively detained to try to stop major disruptive actions. In the United States, a climate activist protecting a forest in Georgia was allegedly murdered in cold blood by police.

Of course, none of this is new in poorer countries in Latin America, Asia, or the African continent. What is new is that they are happening even in the power centers of capitalism.

In the choice between halting climate collapse or ending the privilege of capitalist profit, the system has decided: it will mobilize whatever resources are necessary to maintain the destruction. Not only will it not do what it recognizes as necessary and what it has signed up to in agreements like Paris, but it will use brute force to keep the insatiable profit machine running, even at the cost of climate collapse.

Any consequent climate protest—or social resistance of any threatening kind—will have to be banned.

This will be done both with the backing of The Greens in Germany and Labour in the UK, and by so many political organizations more concerned with order than life. They have chosen the camp of catastrophe.

If we remember that the announced president of this year's climate summit is the CEO of one of the world's largest oil companies, we close the knot: the institutional way to stop the climate crisis has hanged itself in public and we can all watch its swinging corpse. No election and no summit will stop the path to catastrophe designed by capitalism. Without the action and courage of the climate justice movement there will be no path forward. As well as stopping the damage currently done, it must build the transformation that the historical moment we live in demands.

The battle of Lützerath marks the beginning of a new stage. The dominant system has already made its choice: it wants collapse and will violently confront anyone who opposes it. In Lützi, the movement has already shown that it will not retreat. The time has come for the movement to move forward.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Joao Camargo.

The U.S House of Representatives still has no speaker after Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy failed to get the full backing of his party over the course of two days and six rounds of voting. A contingent of about 20 far-right lawmakers opposes McCarthy’s elevation to the top job, but no other candidate has emerged so far who can garner the 218 votes necessary to claim the speaker’s gavel. The impasse has ground all congressional business to a halt, including the swearing-in of new members like Texas Democrat Greg Casar, who says the dysfunction in Congress is no accident. “This is part of their goal. They don’t want a functioning federal government that can pass legislation and support working people,” Casar says of the Republican Party. We also speak with The Intercept’s Ryan Grim, who says much of the press has missed the substance of the fight over the speakership, which is about the far right’s drive to slash social spending, even if it means refusing to raise the debt ceiling and triggering a U.S. default that would crash the economy.

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

She has recently also made common cause with majority ethnic Han Chinese people studying in Britain, not least during a series of protests in London in solidarity with the political events in China that marked the last months of 2022.

A long-term resident of the United Kingdom, Mahmut spoke to RFA's Mandarin Service about how Chinese Communist Party propaganda harms Uyghurs, and about the potential for a multi-ethnic movement to fight for human rights and democracy in China, inspired by the recent "white paper" protests in China, which were in part an outpouring of grief over the deaths of Uyghurs during a lockdown fire in Xinjiang's regional capital Urumqi.

"I was very touched to see so many Han Chinese students come out to pay tribute to the Uyghurs who died," Mahmet said of a Nov. 27 rally held in drizzling rain outside the Chinese Embassy in London, in the wake of the Urumqi blaze.

"Ninety percent of them were young people, and they are finally coming out," she said.

Mahmut didn't say much to them at first, but then a young Han Chinese man commented on the flag she had brought – the pale blue flag of an independent East Turkestan representing Uyghurs' wish for a nation-state of their own in what is currently Xinjiang.

The student wanted to know why she insisted on calling for independence for Uyghurs.

"I told him it was my dream, and that I should at least be allowed to dream it," Mahmut said. "Look at here – Scotland has its own parliament, its own flag, its own football team that takes part in the World Cup, and the Scottish National Party that calls for independence every day, and yet the British government doesn't arrest them."

"Neither do they imprison them as separatists," she told the man.

Labeled separatists and extremists

Pretty soon, the conversation had attracted the attention of other Chinese students at the rally, who gathered round and started asking Mahmut questions, all of which she addressed patiently, one by one.

"I just told them about the persecution that we Uyghurs have suffered, and how we have nothing to do with so-called terrorists," she said. "[I said] we are very opposed to such violence, because it won't bring us any benefits."

"It's just the Chinese government, this anti-Uyghur propaganda, that calls us separatists and extremists," she told the students.

By International Human Rights Day on Dec. 10, Chinese activists in the U.K. had sought out the Uyghurs and suggested making common cause with them.

"We were joined on Human Rights Day by a new team – of rights activists from mainland China, many of whom said they wanted to stand united with the Uyghurs, making our voices louder," Mahmut said, adding that this was an unprecedented event that was largely sparked by the public outcry over the Urumqi lockdown fire.

For her part, she is willing to keep educating Chinese studying overseas about the treatment of Uyghurs at the hands of the Chinese state.

"Han Chinese have always been treated preferentially, while Uyghurs have always been treated like second-class citizens," Mahmut said, adding that it's also not an easy task.

"The mutual trust between Han Chinese and Uyghurs has been shattered for a long time now," she said. "Naturally, one feels that these people have taken away everything that should belong to you. That's how it feels."

Personal story

Mahmut is speaking directly from her own experience. 

She was unable to find a job in Urumqi after graduating from the Dalian University of Technology in the early 1990s, yet saw plenty of Han Chinese who were less well-qualified get hired instead.

Later, after becoming a teacher, Mahmut saw Han Chinese teachers given preferential treatment, while the authorities treated Uyghur teachers as a potential threat to official ideology, liable to spread "politically incorrect" ideas in the classroom.

Such discrimination is visible in almost every area of daily life in Xinjiang, with Uyghurs an oppressed minority from school to workplace, she said.

What's more, the Communist Party's depiction of Uyghurs as potential extremists or terrorists appears to have worked on most of the Han Chinese population.

"Particularly among Han Chinese who've never had any contact with Uyghurs, they already have a preconceived impression that we are very violent, and can't be trusted," Mahmut said.

"Some Han Chinese say Uyghurs are thieves, and will steal from you, which is a racist and insulting thing to say about any ethnic group," she said.

Mahmut fled Xinjiang in 2000 in the wake of the violent crackdown on mass protests against religious repression and racial discrimination by Uyghurs in Ghulja (in Chinese, Yining) in 1997. 

She went to study in the United Kingdom, devoting herself to human rights activism at the same time.

Lost contact

But since the mass incarceration of Uyghurs in "re-education" and forced labor camps beginning in 2016, she has lost contact with her family back home.

"I haven't heard from my family in six years – can you imagine that?" she told the students outside the embassy. "We Uyghurs are living in so much pain, and where have you been in the past six years?"

"People back in China certainly don't know what's really going on there, but you, you can see a lot of reporting on this from overseas, and yet we still haven't seen you speaking out for us," she said.

The reaction she got was unexpected, and very moving, Mahmut recalled.

"One student came up and asked if they could give me a hug, saying, 'We owe you so much!' Then several more people came up and wanted to hug me," she said. "I was very moved."

"They had heard what I said ... I could see from their faces they had a lot of empathy, and a lot of shame," she said.

Three years of full-on government surveillance, mass tracking of citizens via the COVID-19 tracker app, and rolling lockdowns during which people were welded or barricaded into their own apartments by zero-COVID enforcement officials appear to have changed the public mood in China, Mahmut said.

The "white paper" movement saw young people across China risk official retaliation to take flowers to the streets for the Uyghur victims of the Urumqi blaze.

"Some earth-shattering changes have taken place [in Xinjiang] since 2016, involving what is basically unimaginable cruelty," Mahmut said. "So now I think we have the beginning of mutual understanding."

"Both ethnic groups are, in fact, innocent," she said. "The behavior of the Han people was caused by the Chinese government, so we're all victims."

Translated by Luisetta Mudie. Edited by Malcolm Foster.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Amelia Loi for RFA Mandarin.

In the midst of World War II, on November 10, 1942, Winston Churchill said of the war: “Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”

The year 2022 was disappointing for the stated American goal of reducing the country’s carbon dioxide emissions, which rose by 1.5%. In contrast, China’s emissions fell by 0.9% and Europe, despite the Putin energy crisis decreased its output by 0.8%.

The Inflation Reduction Act has $369 billion in it to promote green energy.

The Biden administration and U.S. civil society organizations and private companies, however, laid the groundwork for potentially impressive U.S. progress through the rest of this decade. That is, 2022 may have been the end of the beginning.

The Infrastructure and Jobs Act passed a little over a year ago contained $7.5 billion for zero- and low-emission buses and ferries, and another $7.5 billion for a nation-wide network of electric car chargers. It contains $105 billion to upgrade and expand public transportation, which will mean fewer people dependent on automobiles. Even the monies dedicated to improving port and airport infrastructure have a mandate to reduce congestion and carbon emissions.

While initially Postmaster Louis DeJoy, a Trump-era holdover, was dragging his feet on electric vehicle purchase, he caved to pressure from the administration and Congress and has agreed to purchase at least 66,000 battery-electric vehicles through 2028 as part of a 106,000 vehicle purchase plan. He is also expanding USPS parking structures and putting in electric chargers. All environmentalists would have been pleased if he would move even faster. Still, there are only 1.7 million EVs on the road in the US (up from 400,000 in the second quarter of 2018), and 66,000 would be 4% of all those existing electric vehicles. The more EVs are bought, the more the price of the batteries will fall and the more their efficiency will increase. Automobile costs are expected to fall over the next decade as a result, and big government purchases will be very helpful.

This year, 18% of new car registrations in California were electric, and about 6% in the country as a whole. That is a big increase from almost zero just a few years ago. All the big auto firms are betting the farm on going electric, and with Biden administration help are building billions of dollars worth of new battery plants. It will take a few years for this build-out to come to fruition, but when it happens, it will be like opening the floodgates.

There are only 229 coal-fired power plants left in the U.S. In November, President Joe Biden pledged to close them all. Despite the energy crisis, nearly 6% (11,778 megawatts) of U.S. coal-fired generation capacity is expected to shut down in 2022. If we can double that rate of closure every year for the next ten years, they will all be gone by 2032, which is a reasonable expectation. The cost of solar-wind-battery generation will fall over that period, making coal prohibitively expensive. In fact, coal is already expensive, costing about 6 cents a kilowatt hour to generate electricity. That does not count all the health and climate damage it does. If that were figured in, it would be more like 80 cents a kilowatt hour. In contrast, wind and solar are roughly 4 cents a kilowatt hour and have been falling. In very sunny states solar could be as little as 2 cents a kilowatt hour.

Battery storage capacity is also increasing rapidly throughout the states, which can cover at least some high-demand periods. California is up to 3 gigawatts, with plans for more.

The Inflation Reduction Act has $369 billion in it to promote green energy. The Biden Administration is letting leases for offshore wind farms. $4 billion in bids were let for New York and New Jersey alone, and over $700 million for installations off the coast of California. Likewise, Houston and New Orleans have their eyes on this energy source. Off the coast of the Atlantic and the Gulf of Mexico the shelf is shallow enough so that wind turbines can be anchored to the sea bottom. The Pacific is so deep off California that firms will have to put up floating wind turbines, of a sort that have been installed off the coast of Scotland. The U.S. has lagged behind on offshore wind as an energy source, having almost none right now. But in two years, that will begin changing. One advantage of offshore wind is that winds blow more steadily out at sea and so those turbines can take up some of the slack from solar panels, which go dark at sundown.

We are on the verge of an amazing new, low-carbon America. CO2 emissions will be with us for years to come, but by 2030 perhaps we can start talking about the beginning of the end.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Juan Cole.

The post I spy… something Beginning with Con appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Stephen Corry.

There are only two ways that independent nations can be governed: by the people themselves through free and fair elections with maximum participation, or by an elite group that is only acting for its own benefit.

Trump and virtually the entire GOP have chosen autocracy, going all-in on voter intimidation, throwing people off voter rolls or preventing their votes from being counted, and trying to rig future elections.

Democracy or autocracy. Freedom or oligarchy. Liberty or tyranny. Violence or the rule of law.

Trump and virtually the entire GOP have chosen autocracy, going all-in on voter intimidation, throwing people off voter rolls or preventing their votes from being counted, and trying to rig future elections.

And they're getting a big assist from other countries that have already been taken over by autocrats like Trump aspires to become. Countries that are trying to take down democracies all over the world.

Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau held a press conference and announced yesterday that China is actively interfering with Canada's democracy.

A recent newspaper report disclosed that at least 11 candidates for federal office in Canada had been directly funded by the Chinese government, and there are concerns this is just the tip of the iceberg.

In a press conference Monday Trudeau said:

"We have taken significant measures to strengthen the integrity of our elections processes and our systems, and we'll continue to invest in the fight against election interference, against foreign interference of our democracy and institutions. Unfortunately, we're seeing countries, state actors from around the world, whether it's China or others, are continuing to play aggressive games with our institutions, with our democracies."

Dan Stanton, a former Canadian intelligence official, told the Canadian news site Global News:

"The sophistication of the threat: it is not the guy with the fedora and black coat, like the old days with the KGB. The whole point of influence networks is that anyone can be used by a foreign state as a co-optee, or agent, or source."

In Russia, Yevgeny Prigozhin—the founder of the Wagner Group, Russia's equivalent of Blackwater, and a close associate of Putin—bragged on social media that Russia had been and would continue to interfere in American elections.

"Gentlemen," he wrote, "we have interfered, are interfering and will interfere. Carefully, precisely, surgically and in our own way, as we know how to do."

When I was a child in 1956, Soviet Premiere Khrushchev famously told a group of western nations visiting Moscow:

"Whether you like it or not, history is on our side. We will bury you!"

His statement led representatives from 12 NATO nations and Israel to walk out of the meeting.

The subsequent Cold War that I lived through was explicitly a battle between democracy and autocracy, between the free nations of the west and the brutal fist of the Soviet Union that President Putin speaks of so nostalgically.

The democracies of the world banded together to both defend themselves against the "communist" autocracies; at the same time, the autocracies banded together to support and reinforce each other's power over their own people.

The Soviet Union is gone and China is now a major semi-capitalist power, but Russia and China are still autocracies. In this, they're joined by all of the Middle Eastern kingdoms and over a hundred autocratic governments on three continents.

And, tragically, that group of iron-fisted oligarchs have been embraced by Trump and are now a role model for today's Republican Party here in the US.

One of them, Viktor Orbán—the autocrat who runs Hungary, has handed the media over to his oligarch buddies, completely packed the courts, and rigs every election—was invited to speak at CPAC and applauded by numerous elected Republicans. Tucker Carlson broadcast his show with Orbán from Budapest.

Most Americans are unaware of how close we came to becoming an outright police state during the final year of the Trump presidency, a period the GOP is trying to revive if they can rig a Republican into the White House in 2024.

A report from the office of the Secretary of Homeland Security, recently declassified and shared by Senator Ron Wyden, lays out in stunning detail how Trump pulled together multiple federal police agencies and threw them at one American city in what appears to be an attempt to provide the rationale for a nationwide crackdown on Democratic and progressive activists.

I believe it was to be the initial serious test of a grand strategy that could be used, if this experiment turned out successfully, in much larger cities in the future. We are only beginning to learn the full depth of it.

Under the direction of Donald Trump's illegally acting secretary of homeland security, Chad Wolf, and his acting deputy, Ken Cuccinell (who held that position illegally, too), hundreds of federal officers were sent into Portland, Oregon to harass, assault, arrest, humiliate, photograph, fingerprint, and secretly compile derogatory information about Black Lives Matter protestors in that city.

In a whistleblower complaint by Brian Murphy, the former head of DHS' Intelligence Branch, The New York Times reported in July of last year that Murphy "said in the complaint that he was ordered this spring by Chad F. Wolf, the acting secretary of the department, to stop producing assessments on Russian interference…"

Instead, Trump's DHS sent over 700 federal officers—many without visible identification—into Portland as unrest in the city was dying down. Their apparent goal was to stir things back up, produce good footage for nightly rightwing media reports, practice illegal snatch-and-grab policing that Trump would OK after the coup, and compile secret police "intelligence" on Portland's protestors.

Senator Ron Wyden tweeted about the situation on July 16, 2020:

The domestic terror campaign, called Operation Diligent Valor, was launched by Trump's criminally-serving DHS heads and was authorized by a blatantly unconstitutional June 26, 2020 Executive Order 13933 that had a title including the phrase "Combatting Recent Criminal Violence."

Around 2 am on the night of July 15th, after that day's BLM protests had died down in Portland, Mark Pettibone and his friend Connor O'Shea were walking home. As Oregon Public Broadcasting (OPB) reported the next day:

"They had barely made it half a block when an unmarked minivan pulled up in front of them.

"'I see guys in camo,' O'Shea said. 'Four or five of them pop out, open the door and it was just like, "Oh shit. I don't know who you are or what you want with us."'"

The feds were driving around the city simply abducting—and shooting at— people, refusing to identify themselves, dragging folks off for intimidation and interrogation.

Just like in Pinochet's Chile after the September 11, 1973 coup, only in Portland in 2020 they hadn't yet started seriously torturing and killing. This was, after all, an experiment.

Many of the people abducted weren't even in the vicinity of the contested Federal Building.

OPB reported:

"'I am basically tossed into the van,' Pettibone said. 'And I had my beanie pulled over my face so I couldn't see and they held my hands over my head.'

"Pettibone and O'Shea both said they couldn't think of anything they might have done to end up targeted by law enforcement. They attend protests regularly but they said they aren't 'instigators.' They don't spray paint buildings, shine laser pointers at officers or do anything else other than attend protests, which law enforcement have regularly deemed 'unlawful assemblies.'

"Blinded by his hat, in an unmarked minivan full of armed people dressed in camouflage and body armor who hadn't identified themselves, Pettibone said he was driven around downtown before being unloaded inside a building. He wouldn't learn until after his release that he had been inside the federal courthouse.

"'It was basically a process of facing many walls and corners as they patted me down and took my picture and rummaged through my belongings,' Pettibone said. …

"Pettibone said he was put into a cell. Soon after, two officers came in to read him his Miranda rights. They didn't tell him why he was being arrested. He said they asked him if he wanted to waive his rights and answer some questions, but Pettibone declined and said he wanted a lawyer. The interview was terminated, and about 90 minutes later he was released. He said he did not receive any paperwork, citation or record of his arrest."

This is not how nations that respect the rule of law operate, which is why Senator Wyden released the report. But it is perfectly normal in Hungary, Russia, Belarus, Turkey, China, Saudi Arabia, and dozens of other autocratic nations.

We read novels by Franz Kafka in high school and assume, "Well, of course, that could never happen here."

But it did. And he'll do it again if he becomes president again. In a heartbeat. He's already talking, at his rallies, about the various people he wants to see imprisoned. His list is now much longer than only Hillary.

In just the past week, he's added Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, Congressman Adam Schiff, Congresswoman Ilhan Omar, and a reporter for the Reuters news agency.

Yesterday, at a rally in Ohio, Trump told the crowd—to raucous cheers—that if he becomes president again he'll have drug dealers shot "within two hours" of being arrested and the bullet used to kill them sent to their families. No booking, no due process, no court or judge or jury: just an execution. And the people attending his rally loved it.

OPB quoted attorney Juan Chavez, director of the civil rights project at the Oregon Justice Resource Center, as saying of Trump's 2020 attack on Portland, "It's like stop and frisk meets Guantanamo Bay."

I rarely speculate, but this seems fairly clear: like Watergate unraveled, we will probably soon learn that in 2020 Trump and his people were both testing strategy and looking for justification for a nationwide crackdown, using the rubric of "antifa-motivated terrorism." Wolf had come to Portland personally to supervise the abduction and kidnap operation.

That now-declassified DHS report on the events during Trump's presidency tells how the invading federal officers "directed reports regarding Portland to use 'Violent Antifa Anarchists Inspired' (VAAI) as a term of reference."

If they could find even the faintest shred of association between the various people they had abducted, vandalism at the federal building, and some sort of conspiracy called "Antifa" then they would have their excuse to go national.

At the same time Trump was attacking Portland, openly denigrating the European Union, trying to gut NATO, and withholding military aid from Ukraine, he was also sucking up to anti-democratic dictators around the world.

His embrace of the dictator of Saudi Arabia earned his family at least $2 billion; his support of China's President Xi (his belligerent rhetoric notwithstanding) got his daughter valuable patents; and his longstanding relationship with Putin set up today's genocide in Ukraine. He even sent "love letters" to North Korea's murderous tyrant Kim Jong-un.

Then he attacked America on January 6th, injuring over 140 capitol police and killing one officer, Brian Sicknick, in an attempt to end the counting of electoral votes and impose a state of martial law. Apparently some in on the plot believed this would best be accomplished using the murder of Vice President Mike Pence and Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi as an excuse.

A series of lucky coincidences and brave actions by the Capitol Police and Pence himself prevented those killings, the gallows Trump's people had erected notwithstanding, and thus prevented him from imposing the state of emergency and martial law, suspending democracy, that Michael Flynn was begging him to initiate.

So probably this week we find out where we go from here.

From the Democrats' point of view today's election will determine:

If America can continue to get to the bottom of Trump's conspiracy to overturn our form of government.

If America can truly serve the majority of its own people rather than a tiny slice of the morbidly rich.

If Social Security, Medicare, the minimum wage, the right to unionize, Obamacare, and regulatory agencies like the EPA cannot just survive the GOP onslaught but do even better by America and her citizens.

For Republicans it's an opportunity to test how far they can push grotesque and even untrue slasher campaigns against both Democrats and democracy before the backlash outweighs the benefits.

To learn if the Party's funding billionaires can continue to pour hundreds of millions of dollars a day into television advertising nationwide and the national media will continue to avoid mentioning its impact on "tightening the polls."

To see if requiring mail-in voters to include a photocopy of their drivers' license, as Georgia's new voter suppression law demands, will crush the Democratic mail-in vote in that state so the scheme can be tried in other states (it appears to be working: Greg Palast reports mail-in votes have dropped by over a million in that state).

And, of course, republicans see today's election as their opportunity to set up the end of democracy in 2024 and install their very own version of Putin, Duterte, or Orbán in the White House in two years, regardless of what the majority of American voters want.

Vote!

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News &amp; Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Thom Hartmann.

The tears came freely as the birth of the new nation of Papua New Guinea was heralded by a new flag — the Glorious Red, Black and Gold.

Tears of joy, tears of freedom, tears of sadness, all rolled into one on the momentous occasion of the end of an era of colonialism.

Julius Chan, then a raw young politician and a prolific crusader for the cause of independence, remembers the occasion like it was yesterday.

• READ MORE: Auckland’s PNG community celebrates Independence Day

And his tears overwhelmed the man from New Ireland, which implored an euphoric realisation of freedom after years of political bickering against Australia.

On the morning of 16 September 1975, the flag of Australia was lowered at the Sir Hubert Murray Stadium in Port Moresby.

With pomp and ceremony, the flag of the new nation of Papua New Guinea — the Kumul soaring over the Southern Cross constellation — was raised to signify the birth of our country.

These are solemn moments.

Flag raising touched hearts
The flag raising touched the hearts and lives of the people who were there, who were witnesses of a dramatic shift in colonization and democracy.

Many people cried, many in sadness and many more in joy. It is a moment etched in time, a proud moment of nationhood.

One man who was there, and who has carried the country through thick and thin is PNG’s longest serving parliamentarian and the Last Knight Standing, Sir Julius Chan.

In an exclusive interview with the Post-Courier’s senior reporter Gorethy Kenneth, Sir Julius remembers the solemnity of the moment.

“I shed tears of joy and sadness, the old had ended, and a new was beginning,” Sir Julius reminisced.

“I do remember very clearly the Australian flag being lowered, folded and presented by John Guise to Prince Charles — now our King Charles III — who then presented it to the Australian Governor-General Sir John Kerr.

“And when the Papua New Guinea flag was hoisted, at that very moment, how I felt? …well, very sensational, I was proud, a sensation of final achievement of a goal in life, I had my head down, first, I tilted my head up watching the flag being raised, and each time the PNG flag was raised by the bearers, there was feeling of pride, sensation,” he said.

Finally ‘broken free’
“I had a few tears, I felt, in my gut, for the first time that I had finally broken free of the colonial yoke, that is when I knew we were free. That was probably the most memorable moment.

“It is 47 years now and my greatest wish is that we make the best of what we have, never give up and don’t expect anything from nothing and everything.

“Life is not meant to be easy and to achieve anything in life; we got to work for it.

“And also probably we really have to reiterate corruption — corruption is so bad and it’s not paid for by the ordinary people that they playing with little games, corruption is wild at the top, that’s what I really think and that the three arms of government must act in accordance with the constitutional spirit of the constitution.

“They must not fear to intervene in the area in which the Constitution requires them to.

“It’s all about justice delayed is the cause and the root of all the evils happening today.”

Sir Julius said that at the stroke of midnight on September 1975 a fireworks display lit up the Port Moresby sky to signal the beginning of independence for Papua New Guinea.

The Australian flag, which had been flown since 1906, was lowered for the last time at dusk on 16 September 1975 and handed to Prince Charles, the heir to the British throne, who passed it on to Australia’s Governor General, Sir John Kerr.

Drums beat all night
All through the day and night, the beat of drums could be heard as members of tribes from all over the new nation of jungles and mountainous islands danced in celebration of their new identity.

Papua New Guinea, a nation of 2.6 million inhabitants most of whom lived in very rural settings, had to deal with a situation. Fifteen days before the independence, a declaration of independence was made on September 1 by a secessionist movement on Bougainville.

This declaration which posed a direct threat to the new central government’s authority was dispelled.

“We were still united,” Sir Julius said.

“Our Independence Day celebrations were massive and probably organised on a scale far superior to any other form of gathering in the country before or since.

“You ask anybody why 16 September 1975 was chosen as the official date, I do not think they could tell you.

“Perhaps it was nominated because it was convenient for the Australian Governor-General Sir John Kerr, or for Prince Charles, who came as the Queen’s special representative.

“Gough Whitlam as Prime Minister of Australia came, as well as Malcolm Fraser, who was then opposition leader.”

Good job governing
Australia had governed the enormous, rugged land, and had done a good job.

“I believe what they did was quite appropriate for a country at that stage of development,” he said.

“Any other colonial power such as Britain or Germany would run PNG in a completely different way. Australia was a very young country as they had only come into a Federation in 1901 and they were not entrenched in colonial rule, they themselves were treading on new ground.”

The flag lowering ceremony and fireworks display marked the end of efforts by the Australian Government of Prime Minister Gough Whitlam to thrust Papua New Guinea into independence and thus rid itself of the stigma of colonial rule.

Speaking at the ceremony, Sir John Guise, the first Governor-General of Papua New Guinea, said it was important that people realised the spirit in which the flag was being lowered.

“We are lowering it,” he said, “not tearing it down.”

Sir John Kerr said the ceremony did not mark the end of Australia’s interest in Papua New Guinea or involvement with it.

Australia, he said, “remains deeply and irrevocably committed to Papua New Guinea.”

But for 39-year-old Michael Somare, the last chief minister during colonial rule and now the nation’s first prime minister, and for other members of his government, Australia’s concern and involvement could be greater than it is.

Republished with permission.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

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The P&O Pacific Explorer has docked in at Queens Wharf in Auckland from Sydney, the first cruise ship to arrive in Aotearoa New Zealand nearly two and a half years.

New Zealand Cruise Association chief executive Kevin O’Sullivan told RNZ First Up that being the first back in the country’s shores, it was a symbolic event for New Zealand.

“It’s going to be a very exciting day and it will be very exciting for the guests coming ashore as well.”

• LISTEN TO RNZ MORNING REPORT: ‘Cruising back to New Zealand and the Pacific will be ramping up over the coming months’

P&O spokesperson David Jones told Morning Report cruising back to New Zealand would be ramping up over the coming months.”

Twenty ships were due to dock in the country before Christmas, he said.

Its arrival also marked the reopening of cruising to the Pacific, with the ship on its way to Fiji next.

About 2000 people — including crew and 1200 passengers — were on board.

Below occupancy
‘We’re actually deliberately operating below occupancy because we’ve really only been back in business for a few months.”

“Cruising is the same but different,” he said.

“You’ve still got the same experience, the relaxation, being taken to great destinations but the changes are the protocols.”

The Pacific Explorer was based in Australia and followed Australian covid-19 rules, Jones said.

“The protocols are probably tighter than any land based environment.”

Passengers and crew need to be fully vaccinated, wear masks when they embark and disembark and when they cannot easily isolated on board.

If there was a covid-19 case onboard, the person and those occupying the same cabin would go into on board quarantine facilities, O’Sullivan said.

Up and running globally
Cruising had been up and running around the world for a long time, he said.

“We’re last really to get cruise ships back so all the hard work’s been done on the cruise ships a long long time ago and we’re getting the benefit of it.”

The last season before the pandemic arrived had an economic value of $550 million, and was on it’s way to being a billion-dollar industry, he said.

“For Auckland alone, the value of that last [truncated] season was around about $200 million.”

Retail NZ said the arrival of cruise ships was welcome news after the long winter of Covid-19.

The next cruise ship would arrive in October.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

An advocacy group on Thursday welcomed an appeals court ruling that, while tossing out a $60 million award to a Missouri peach farmer whose trees were killed by the herbicide dicamba, did not challenge a federal jury's 2020 verdict that the weedkiller's manufacturers are responsible.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit in St. Louis ruled that chemical giants Monsanto—acquired by Bayer AG in 2018—and BASF are liable for damage to Bill Bader's peach groves caused by dicamba, leaving in place a $15 million judgment for nonpunitive damages.

However, the court ordered a new trial to determine punitive damages to be assessed against each company separately. Punitive damages worth $60 million, a reduction from the jury's original award of $250 million, were dismissed pending the new trial.

"The appeals court correctly held Monsanto and BASF responsible for unprecedented damage to Bader's peach orchard from dicamba drift. But this is just the beginning," said Meredith Stevenson, staff attorney at the Center for Food Safety, an advocacy group that filed an amicus brief in support of Bader.

"The destruction to Bader's orchards provides just a single example of the widespread harm inflicted on thousands of farmers and the environment from Monsanto's negligence and EPA's refusal to cancel its dicamba approval," she added. "We will continue to fight to prevent continued harm to millions of acres of cropland, hundreds of endangered species, parks, wildlife refuges, and other natural areas from dicamba."

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch reports:

Bader's lawsuit, one of more than 100 similar lawsuits over dicamba, went to trial in early 2020. Bayer in June 2020 announced that it would pay up to $400 million to settle the remaining dicamba lawsuits.

Bader, who operates Missouri’s largest peach orchard near the Arkansas border, said many trees were killed when dicamba drifted onto his property from nearby soybean and cotton farms...

Monsanto, which is now owned by Bayer, began selling dicamba-tolerant soybean and cotton seeds it developed in 2015 and 2016, respectively, leading to an explosion of dicamba use, Bader and other farmers have said.

A report published last year by the Environmental Protection Agency revealed that during the administration of former President Donald Trump, high-ranking officials intentionally excluded scientific evidence of dicamba-related hazards, including the risk of widespread drift damage, before reapproving the dangerous chemical.

Another 2021 EPA report described the widespread harm to farmers and the environment caused by dicamba during last year's growing season.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News &amp; Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Brett Wilkins.

The United States Supreme Court has handed down a ruling overturning Roe v Wade, the landmark 1973 decision that found there was a constitutional right to abortion.

In Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organisation, the Court ruled 6-3 that

The Constitution makes no reference to abortion, and no such right is implicitly protected by any constitutional provision.

Abortion regulation has now been returned to the individual states. Yet rather than resolving the debate over abortion in the US, we will likely see a dramatic escalation of abortion lawsuits and legislation.

• READ MORE: Roe overturned: What you need to know about the Supreme Court abortion decision
• How the US right-to-life movement is influencing the abortion debate in Australia
• ‘A revolutionary ruling – and not just for abortion’: A Supreme Court scholar explains the impact of Dobbs

That is because the goal of abortion opponents has always been to stop abortion nationwide. Overturning Roe v Wade is just the beginning.

Roe v Wade has been under constant attack
For 49 years, Roe v Wade has been under constant attack from opponents of reproductive rights, surviving repeated legal challenges and reaffirmed on multiple occasions by the Supreme Court.

Despite the political controversy and polarising rhetoric from Republican politicians, 2021 polling indicated 80 percent of Americans support abortion in all or most cases, and at least 60 percent support Roe v. Wade.

However, after former President Donald Trump was able to fill three Supreme Court vacancies, conservatives had a 6-3 majority on the bench.

The end of Roe v Wade seemed inevitable and the question became whether the judgement would be gradually gutted or overturned in one fell swoop.

Factbox: Broad U.S. support for abortion rights at odds with Supreme Court’s restrictions https://t.co/BWN1lYhLK7 pic.twitter.com/vUshXq8BQ4

— Reuters (@Reuters) June 24, 2022

What can Biden and the Democrats do?
In early May, a draft of Justice Samuel Alito’s majority decision was leaked, indicating it would be overturned.

Protests from abortion rights supporters erupted, including outside the Supreme Court and the homes of conservative justices.

President Joe Biden swiftly issued a statement insisting a “woman’s right to choose is fundamental” and his administration has spent the intervening months meeting with abortion rights advocates. However, there is little of substance the president or Congressional Democrats can do to reverse the decision.

In mid-May, the Women’s Health Protection Act, which sought to codify abortion rights, was defeated in the Senate.

And although Democrats have a majority in both houses of Congress, without filibuster reform they do not have the numbers to pass legislation, which has stymied much of the Democratic agenda during Biden’s presidency.

While Biden promised to issue Executive Orders on reproductive rights if Roe v Wade is overturned, these would work to offset only some of the likely consequences of the new abortion landscape.

Meanwhile, in the days after the May leak, Congressional Republicans met with prominent anti-abortion leaders to discuss a nationwide ban on abortion after six weeks.

Such a move would shift the contours of the abortion fight back to the national stage and would ensure abortion is front and centre in the 2024 presidential elections.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez responds to Supreme Court ruling overturning Roe v. Wade: “They chose to endanger the lives of all women and all birthing people in this country. But not only that, they have chosen to strip rights of men too.” https://t.co/p3tvxQxVTz pic.twitter.com/kZm8sdo3s8

— MSNBC (@MSNBC) June 24, 2022

State laws on abortion access and provision
With the overturning of Roe v Wade, abortion access and provision will be shaped by a patchwork of state laws.

Thirteen states already have “trigger” laws on the books that criminalise abortion if Roe is overturned. A further 10 are expected to move quickly to ban the procedure.

States hostile to abortion have also begun debating how to close legislative “loopholes”, considering laws that are more extreme than any previously proposed.

In addition to pursuing abortion bans, including from the moment of conception, many of the new laws no longer allow for abortion in cases of rape or incest.

Provisions that would allow abortion to protect maternal health are being so narrowly defined as to render them almost meaningless.

In Oklahoma, one Republican complained the proposed law did not ban abortion in instances of ectopic pregnancy, a condition fatal to the pregnant person if left untreated.

Louisiana Republicans debated language that would have charged abortion patients with homicide.

Opponents of abortion are also strategising about how to prevent patients from accessing abortion from out-of-state providers, including discussing banning interstate travel and making abortion providers and support networks subject to legal sanction.

Nineteen states already ban virtual provision of abortion care, and opponents of abortion are particularly keen to criminalise and limit patient access to medication abortion provided via telehealth.

The National Right to Life Committee has drafted model state legislation that would make it illegal to provide information on self-managed abortion via phone, internet, or website, effectively targeting the First Amendment right to free speech.

MEET THE BENCH: Chief Justice John Roberts didn’t join his conservative colleagues in overturning Roe v. Wade — saying he would ‘take a more measured course.’ https://t.co/BeXTvQzwnv pic.twitter.com/cyFi21Q83A

— Fox News (@FoxNews) June 24, 2022

Some states have laws enshrining the right to abortion
Supporters of reproductive rights have also been galvanised by the looming end of Roe v Wade.

Sixteen states, primarily on the east and west coasts, as well as the District of Columbia, have laws enshrining the right to abortion.

California has passed laws protecting abortion providers and patients accessing care from out-of-state civil lawsuits, while New York has passed a package of laws that would make it an abortion “safe haven”.

Advocates are pushing the White House to challenge any law criminalising out-of-state travel to receive an abortion.

A Jewish synagogue is suing the state of Florida, claiming the state’s abortion ban violates religious freedoms protected by the First Amendment.

Impact on abortion patients
Politically and legally, the struggle over abortion rights is primed to explode nationwide, with no foreseeable end in sight.

Yet the impact of today’s Supreme Court decision will be most acutely felt by abortion patients.

Most of the toughest abortion bans and regulations are in the South and Midwest, rendering abortion inaccessible in a vast geographic stretch of the country.

Approximately half of US women and girls of reproductive age live in states where abortion is or will become illegal.

Overturning Roe v Wade will result in the closure of more than a quarter of the nation’s abortion clinics, placing huge pressure on the remaining providers to offer time-sensitive care to patients likely travelling hundreds of kilometres from home.

Banning abortion does not stop abortion
Banning abortion does not stop abortion, nor does it reduce the number of abortions. Regardless of their home state, pregnant people will still seek abortions, although they may need significant resources to do so and could face criminal sanctions.

The majority of abortion patients in the US are already from vulnerable and marginalised populations.

The devastating consequences of this decision will fall primarily on the shoulders of those least able to bear it.

Dr Prudence Flowers is a senior lecturer in US history, College of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences, Flinders University. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence. Read the original article.

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