Decolonization and justice in the age of climate and biosphere breakdown 🇵🇸 🌏 When faced with our own destruction, we act against reason
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The ruling class of the West & Global North knows that food & resource scarcities & unlivable conditions leading to mass migrations & geopolitical turmoil are inevitable & imminent. They know full well that there is no way...
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On April 10, 1948 Albert Einstein called Israelis terrorists and criminals.
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Israel should be located in Germany, not Palestine. This is my two-state solution.
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We must BDS Israel even if there's a ceasefire. What they've done--for the past 15 months and since 1947--is unforgivable. Israeli leaders and soldiers must face trial and punishment. We must never give up the cause of justice for and liberation of Palestinians.
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Spring has disappeared from South Asia. Soon we're going to suffer crop failures, famine, and mass migrations due to lack of water and intolerable heat. Our political leaders in the region are clueless, and our societies are ill-informed and unprepared, including psychologically.
Heat waves are hitting India early, with a 38°C forecast already, and it is still only February! Climate change is driving an exponential rise in extreme heat exposure worldwide. Heat-related deaths for over-65s are up 85% from 2004—an incredible rise.
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South Asia is sleepwalking towards climate catastrophe. It's the highest populated & among the most climate change vulnerable regions in the world, yet there's hardly any public awareness or policy discussions on the unlivable conditions, crop failures & mass migrations to come.
The boiling continues in #India. Millions have no access to air conditioning, and water supplies in many regions are being stretched. A global 2C increase will make many parts of this region #uninhabitable during the #summer months. #Adaptation and #mitigation are urgent.
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I call upon Global South scholars & researchers to reconsider our presence in Western academia.
By now it is abundantly clear that Western nations & institutions incl. universities are fully committed to maintaining their colonialist domination over the world, at any cost.
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Trump has ordered huge swathes of US forests to be cut down for timber. An ecocidal and genocidal empire. Never was there a more urgent time to organize mass action in the US against the US in defense of the climate, forests, ecosystems, and indigenous people everywhere.
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If Kamala Harris wins this election it will set a dangerous precedent because the Democratic Party & the ruling class of the US & the West will know that they can get away with the most evil atrocities by always dangling the threat of a “greater evil”.
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Where are all the bats??
They’re dead.
Let’s not feign innocence & blame the rain. *WE* wiped out insects & starved them.
And unless we end our overconsumption & extractive relationship with nature, we will wipe out a lot more life from an already depleted biosphere.
Where are all the bats? – alarm as numbers fall in England theguardian.com/environment/…
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To those who are calling for @DrJillStein to drop out: Do you really think that the people who have decided to vote for her will give their vote to Kamala Harris even if she drops out?
You don't get it, do you? Idiots.
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In just six years (2016-2021), we've consumed over 75% of what we did over the 20th century.
To address our environmental impacts we need cultural & political innovation much more than technological innovation.
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This turns my stomach. Is there a more jarring image that captures the horror of Zionism, white supremacism, and Western imperialism?
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The speed at which the impacts of climate and ecological breakdown are playing out far exceeds what scientists had anticipated.
The public, however, is still woefully unaware of how quickly and irreversibly the biophysical basis of our lives and societies is unraveling.
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Three recent pieces of research show that climate change has gone beyond any hope for control. Ecosystems are facing utter ruin & with them, our societies & civilization. We need to be aware to prepare ourselves, at least psychologically, at least to some extent.
A short 🧵:
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Zionists have got to work and put this post under limited visibility. They do not want the world to understand that an immensely clear thinker such as Einstein would find Israel’s brutal genocidal occupation of Palestine abhorrent, and would long have disavowed Zionism entirely.
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If you scroll in Bluesky you'd think there was no genocide happening. But in the real world outside that blue sky that is a painted dome to shut out the world, Israel is exterminating Palestinians with full support from the US UK & EU. Folks went there to live in the Truman show.
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Last year I shared a picture of a Palestinian child with his brain blown out in a work chat & wrote that for climate justice researchers to ignore the West’s imperialism & genocide amounts to racism & fraud. My white PhD supervisors accused me of using violent words & images.
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A reminder that it is our modern industrial civilization’s accelerating demand for materials that drives fossil fuel consumption, ecocide & the West’s imperialist assaults on the Global South.
In 6 recent years we've consumed nearly as much as we did in the entire 20th century.
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Gaza's adults don't either.
This is how Western media tells us to think that Palestinian, Arab, black, and brown lives are cheap. As if it's okay to starve and slaughter them once they're not children anymore, which for the genocidaires is around the age of 14.
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The world has abandoned the Palestinian people to their annihilation by Israel-US-UK-EU. Utterly shameful. May we never recover, may we never be forgiven.
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A recent study found that plants are losing their ability to take up CO2. This is just one out of several existential threats they face.
Plants and forests are also dying all over the world due to oxidative stress. The cause—ozone emitted by our modern industrial systems. 🧵
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This article asks, “What will it take for political leaders to start taking climate change seriously?”
We’ve got to realize that this is the wrong question to ask.
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theconversation.com/an-inter…
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I'm sure many of these were EVs meant to make our modern consumer lifestyles "climate-friendly" & "green".
In our hubris we think we can maintain our high-tech industrial civilization despite wrecking the climate & biosphere, but nature has had enough.
nitter.app/LolaPodemos/status/185…
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IOF soldiers who are considering committing suicide — please take out some of your fellow soldiers, friends, and family members before offing yourself. Thank you.
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We shouldn't let Elon Musk and the other space colonization tech billionaires shit on our world like this.
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In this light, I increasingly wonder whether we Global South scholars are helping legitimize Western institutions & their “superiority” (consider the impression that world university rankings give, for example) by participating in them.
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As they have no intention to carry out real climate & ecological action, they hold climate conferences & peddle techno-consumerist greenwashing “solutions” to buy time to divert resources towards systems that help strengthen their imperial hegemony. It's all distraction.
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However, the insightful work done by justice & decolonial scholars doesn’t result in any significant institutional & systemic change.
Despite claiming to work towards a fairer, better world, Western academic & research institutions are aligned with capitalism & colonialism.
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It would be unsurvivable for the majority of the world’s people, including billions in the Global South. But Western climate scientists have made it pretty clear over the past 20 months that they do not care much about the survival of non-white and non-Western people.
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In a world woefully unprepared for the biosphere breakdown that’s just getting started, they are investing in their military & armed forces to control lands & resources abroad & their public at home.
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White person spreads misinformation that gets two Yemeni families -- 8 people -- bombed to bits by US imperial forces. Donates 500 euros in contrition.
That's 500/8 = 62.5 euros per dead Yemeni.
Brown and black lives have never been cheaper.
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... to address climate & ecological breakdown & live with their consequences in a fair way that doesn’t involve redressing global power imbalances, i.e. without ending their economic & geopolitical hegemony.
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We are the last human beings to live in a stable climate & functioning biosphere on Earth.
Was it worth building a civilization capable of taking photographs of sunsets on Mars?
Who has really benefitted from all this techno-scientific excess?
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They are fortifying their borders & developing advanced technologies & methods of surveillance, terror & deadly violence including AI & drones, which they are currently testing on the people of Palestine.
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They have abandoned global cooperation on the climate, biodiversity & human rights & committed themselves to the vicious & insane vision of maintaining their imperialist, white supremacist domination at all cost instead.
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It is evident, for example, even in the realm of climate action research, where techno-solutionism reigns supreme & the need to address the industrial & capitalist roots of environmental destruction & global injustices are largely ignored.
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It feels as though Western universities & research institutions use Global South scholars & scholars of color to veil their capitalism-friendly & Western hegemony-aligned selves under a cloak of diversity & justice visuals and lip service. We’re being used to legitimize them.
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Their silence on Gaza & Palestine, crackdown on anti-genocide protesters & their decision to continue working with Israeli institutions also shows they are not really serious about righting historical & ongoing injustices, even the most urgent & evil ones.
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Yes, Western universities & research institutes hire some of us & give us some resources & opportunities to critically study & challenge Western ideologies & systems, which we do not often get in our own colonially-exploited & impoverished nations.
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If Greta and co. on the Freedom Flotilla can risk their lives defying the most deranged and unrestrained mass murderers on the planet then surely we can all organize to put pressure our governments to cut diplomatic and trade ties with the illegitimate Zionist settler-colony.
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... people protesting genocide & ecocide are brutalized & criminalized but universities have research & financial ties with weapons manufacturers & fossil fuel & other ecocidal corporations.
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They will go to great lengths & cross many red lines to quash the global public’s potential to strive for a better, kinder system than the extractivist capitalist empire they helm, which lies at the root of our accelerating social-ecological polycrisis.
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The snow cover on Mt. Everest has receded by a staggering 150 meters after a very warm winter with no significant precipitation.
This Himalayan snow cover sustains the Indus, Ganga, Brahmaputra, Yangtze, Yellow, and Mekong. When we lose it, we lose the ability to feed ourselves.
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OPEN THE FUCKING GATES YOU MONSTERS!!! STOP THE GENOCIDE YOU FUCKING MONSTERS!!!
There, that’s enough for today. Now, back to my job and rendering my services as a worker-consumer to keep the Western empire running.
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Their media, academic & cultural institutions are actively complicit in their imperialist agenda, helping run their propaganda to normalize colonialist & fascist atrocities & enforce a performative democracy where...
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Much of the “solutions” are materials-, energy-, ecology- & coloniality-blind, whether as a result of ignorance or commitment to extractivist-capitalist ideology.
These entrench colonialist exploitation & undermine our own work on climate, ecological & global justice.
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Yesterday, on 15 August, India’s independence day, I remembered a comment made by a white Dutch ex-colleague, a professor, last year. She had remarked that she wished a Gandhi would emerge from among the Palestinian people to chart a non-violent path to their liberation.
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They will become emboldened to expand their imperial campaigns of extermination to other parts of the world. This election is a test of the US public’s red lines and tolerance of evil.
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The climate is a complex system that has always changed, although it had been remarkably stable over the past 10k years. Civilizations in the past have frequently collapsed, primarily as a result of crop failures when climate change & ecological degradation were severe enough.
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Kamala Harris ran a campaign peddling joy while she was committing genocide. The utter callousness and gall of it would disgust any normal, sane person. No wonder so many people stayed home.
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What revolts me most is that 167 nations voted for her. What hope do we have of ending the genocide of Palestinians, or decolonizing, or withstanding the West’s oncoming extractivist-imperialist assaults if we’re busy approving & rewarding their genocide enablers & architects?
In a revolting turn of events in international affairs, former German Foreign Minister Annalena ‘Bombs Away’ Baerbock, has been voted to be the 80th President of the UN General Assembly
Baerbock staunchly supported the Gaza genocide during her time in office and presided over sending weaponry to Israel, to be used to kill innocent Palestinian men, women, and children en masse.
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I saw footage of 3 Palestinian children today. A boy with blood spurting out of his mouth as he took his last breath. A girl with the top of her head blown off, her brain missing. A girl with half her body blown off. Continued inaction after 18 months of this is unforgivable.
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Western civilization is not compatible with the continued existence of complex life on our planet.
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We are not going to be able to keep climate change within a “safe” limit.
We are not going to avoid catastrophic social and environmental breakdown leading to suffering and death on an unimaginable scale.
We need to be clear and honest about this. We must not sell fantasies.
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Dumb fucks.
If/when the world warms by 4ºC, billions of people will have died due to famine, drought, heatwaves, fires, and wars over resources along the way. Much of the earth will be uninhabitable. Modern civilization will be gone. And when 4ºC is reached it won’t stop there.
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It doesn’t matter whether the energy comes from fossil fuels or renewables as long as we use it to power the globalized industrial capitalist economy. Can’t you see this yet?
Why do many climate folks ignore material consumption, which drives energy use, colonialism & ecocide?
Fossil fuels are killing us. Can't you see this yet?!
The only way out is to dismantle the fossil fuel industry
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May I add--
The US and UK should maintain peacekeeping forces there so that the Nazis don’t kill the Zionists and vice-versa.
But the sickos will probably get along just fine. (But who cares if they don't?)
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I’ve had these thoughts for a couple of years now, but I felt inspired to share them after reading this excellent essay a few days ago.
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aljazeera.com/opinions/2022/…
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Behind every world-traveling freedom-enjoying well-to-do Israeli, US American, European, Australian, Canadian is a bunch of black, brown, indigenous person who have been oppressed, exploited, enslaved, tortured, and imprisoned by the Western empire and its outposts and spawn.
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A new paper by degrowth scholars @jasonhickel & Dylan Sullivan suggests we can ensure public luxury & techno-scientific advancement for all with the right policies.
But it ignores the already visible & accelerating impacts of climate & ecological breakdown on such ambitions.
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As the genocide goes on with no end in sight and world Jewry do not organize any action to disrupt the genocidal settler-colonial state set up in their name, it has become increasingly clear that genocidal Zionism is not just an Israeli problem, it’s a Jewish problem.
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Then there is also the reality that the higher education & research system is a resource & energy-intensive enterprise that is embedded in & dependent upon the industrial-capitalist system to operate & maintain. It cannot exist as it is without exploiting the Global South.
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Israel-US-UK-EU are testing both physical and psychological weapons in Gaza to see how the world will react, whether there will be any meaningful global opposition. They’ve learned that the world (except Yemen) is not going to do anything. Not China, not Russia, not anyone.
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It’s a complex world & both things can be true: that we are complicit in Western colonialism & hegemony even as we challenge it while working within these Western institutions. These institutions & systems were built upon & still run on colonialist exploitation & ecocide.
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It keeps us in the trap of thinking that we can convince our leaders when we should really be thinking about how to replace them & the world-destroying industrial capitalist system they helm.
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I also urge Western & white scholars who care about justice to rethink their own presence in them. You're also important in the fight against ecocidal & genocidal Western hegemony. I know it will be difficult for us all, not least because we make our living from this system.
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I urge degrowth & other climate action researchers to keep in mind that all extraction adds damages to people & ecosystems somewhere, & challenge them to rise above techno-modernist ideology to envision radical alternative ways of organizing our lives & societies.
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In the climate & ecological realm, I don’t think we need more research on what to do anyway. It’s already clear we need to end our ecological overshoot. What we need is to focus on educating the public on its root causes & enriching our collective capacity to address them.
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There are no clear institutional alternatives & paths of action as yet, but I think we need to start thinking about them seriously. Avoiding this discussion only helps maintain this system that’s aligned with Western colonialist-capitalist domination of the world.
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Second, trees are struggling to “breathe” in the heat. The hotter it gets, the more plants photorespire than photosynthesize, & the less they are able to draw down CO2. So we’ve wrecked the carbon sequestration mechanism that nature provides for free.
And speaking of heat…
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Addendum:
And our ruling class & the colonialist capitalist system they helm will certainly do their best to keep us unaware of the severity of biosphere breakdown & suppress real political action to address its root causes & face its consequences.
The ruling class of the West & Global North knows that food & resource scarcities & unlivable conditions leading to mass migrations & geopolitical turmoil are inevitable & imminent. They know full well that there is no way...
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It doesn’t matter whether the energy comes from fossil fuels or renewables as long as we use it to power the globalized industrial capitalist economy. Can’t you see this yet?
Why do many climate folks ignore material consumption, which drives energy use, colonialism & ecocide?
Fossil fuels are killing us. Can't you see this yet?!
The only way out is to dismantle the fossil fuel industry
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A valuable lesson here: we must disrupt corporations and capitalism to protect people and other life on our planet.
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I like how pro-Palestine folks in the West say things like, “The masks are truly off and international law and justice are in the gutter thanks to the evil West”, but never things like, “Let’s organize mass civil disobedience and stop working until they end the genocide.”
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When you’re advised to remove criticisms of capitalism, incl. identifying it as a root cause of ecological overshoot, in climate adaptation papers to avoid ideology & trouble in the review process, you start to realize that academia is more hindrance than help to effect change.
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People should have at least a modicum of political awareness and sensitivity. You do not go on holiday in occupied lands. One of the reasons India occupies Kashmir is its scenic beauty and value as a holiday destination. Holidays in occupied lands support and invite tragedy.
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First, global heating is driving an exponential rise in the incidence of extreme wildfires. “The rise in the huge fires [threatens] to create a ‘scary’ feedback loop, in which the vast carbon emissions released by the fires cause more global heating, which causes more fires.”
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Maybe researchers & scholars from the Global South & North can dare to be at the vanguard of the radical social reorganization we need to address our environmental destruction & work towards global justice by rejecting colonialist systems that are unwilling to change.
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Did Nelson Mandela ever regret using armed resistance against the apartheid regime in South Africa? Last year, to support her view that Palestinians should only engage in non-violent struggle, a European colleague claimed he regretted it later in his life. I think she lied.
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All this means land vegetation will die out en masse & a vast number of plant species will go extinct. Most animals, unable to cope with the brutal heat & the loss of plants, our primary food source, will suffer the same fate. Our societies & civilization will collapse.
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A relative who is a US resident told me today that a Nepali person with a US green card who was returning from Nepal had his green card confiscated at Los Angeles airport and was deported.
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This is what happens when "experts" discuss climate change in papers, reports & conferences but the public is sidelined, uninformed & unable to influence policy. Elitist systems are leaving us psychologically & socially unprepared for impacts that will only get much worse.
India: Three people were injured in New Delhi during a clash over tap water. The capital is facing a severe water crisis caused by the ongoing heatwave. The situation has sparked public outrage against the AAP government 🚰💦
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Now that would be living out our principles & showing real leadership, wouldn’t it? Or are we going to limit ourselves to writing & railing against the Western empire while working within it & personally enjoying its benefits for our careers?
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In reality & despite outward appearances, political leaders & the ruling class do take climate change seriously & are taking action to prepare for its consequences, just not action that is in the interest of people & other life on earth.
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Paleoclimate analysis shows that the climate is much more sensitive to GHGs than we thought. Doubling the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere could cause an increase in the earth’s average temperature from 7 to 14°C, much larger than the 2.3 to 4.5°C that the IPCC has estimated.
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Block every single Zionist. Leave them only themselves to interact with. Snuff out their opportunities to spew toxicity. Make them unseen, unheard, and unwanted.
From now on, anyone remotely pro-'israel' is getting blocked. Hasbara blabbering morons, Jewish extremists, and racists will get no response. There is no more debate. No more words. 'israel', its society, 'army', and existence are indefensible and repulsive. Free Palestine.
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To each their own, but the Beatles are incredibly good. Sublime music from the start of their career to the finish.
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I thought, how can you have that hope while you yourself do nothing, not even speak up about their genocide in which your nation and your institution (TU Delft) are actively complicit?
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The dystopia of modern industrial civilization:
- Last 12 months hottest on record
- Fossil fuel use reaches global record, emissions >40bn tons a year for the first time
- Global spending in nuclear weapons up 13%, record rise
- Global defence spending jumped to record $2.2tn
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