by Moneylife Digital Team

EAS Sarma, former secretary to the government of India and a noted public policy expert, has written to prime minister (PM) Narendra Modi urging the immediate revocation of the 2023 amendment to the Mines and Minerals (Development and Regulation) Act (MMDR Act) which permits private companies to mine beach sands rich in Monazite — a critical mineral used in Thorium-based nuclear energy.

In a strongly worded letter, Mr Sarma described the decision to allow private mining of Monazite-rich sands as ‘detrimental to national interest’. He warned that it poses a long-term threat to India’s indigenous nuclear development programme.

He called for the government to uphold the strategic vision of Dr Homi J Bhabha, the architect of India’s atomic energy programme, who advocated for the conservation of Thorium resources and a self-reliant approach to nuclear power generation.

Monazite, a rare-earth phosphate mineral found in the beach sands of Odisha, Andhra Pradesh (AP), Tamil Nadu (TN) and Kerala, is a primary source of Thorium — the long-term fuel for India’s advanced nuclear reactors. Mr Sarma noted that India possesses one of the world’s largest Monazite reserves, making its conservation a matter of national security.

Citing historical context, Mr Sarma pointed out that former PM Jawaharlal Nehru had imposed a ban on the export and private mining of Monazite following the advice of Dr Bhabha. “This policy was meant to safeguard India’s Thorium resources for domestic use in nuclear reactors. However, successive governments have been diluting these protections under external and commercial pressure.”

He particularly highlighted the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government’s relaxation of restrictions during its tenure which led to illegal extraction and export of Monazite until judicial and civil society interventions curbed the practice. In 2019, the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government reinstated the ban on private mining based on recommendations from the department of atomic energy (DAE).

Mr Sarma expressed concern that the 2023 amendment marked a reversal of that policy, once again exposing the country’s strategic resources to private exploitation.

In his letter, the former secretary argued that private miners, driven by profit motives, cannot be entrusted with safeguarding Monazite. He warned of past violations, including unauthorised extraction and export of Monazite-bearing sands, which breached safety thresholds set by the atomic energy regulatory board (AERB).

He also raised concerns over the government’s broader shift in nuclear policy, including dependence on imported uranium and nuclear reactors which, he said, undermines India’s long-term self-reliance in atomic energy. “Opening the floodgates to foreign nuclear imports is a serious setback to Dr Bhabha’s vision,” Mr Sarma wrote.

Citing international developments, the former secretary noted that several countries — including China, Germany, Canada and the US — are making significant advances in Thorium reactor technologies. He referred to a recent breakthrough in China, where researchers reportedly succeeded in reloading a Thorium-powered reactor while it remained in operation — a global first.

Mr Sarma praised the DAE’s role in advancing research & development (R&D) for Thorium fuel in India and stressed that allowing private mining of Monazite would jeopardise this progress. “India can ill-afford to fritter away its precious Thorium resources for other uses,” he says.

Calling the 2023 amendment to the MMDR Act ‘imprudent’, Mr Sarma concluded by appealing to PM Modi to revoke the provision allowing private mining of beach sands and ensure that Monazite remains reserved exclusively for public sector extraction aligned with national strategic priorities.

by Lee Ann Rawlins Williams

Photo caption. Photo by Helena Jankovičová Kováčová (via Pexels)

Flash flooding has been tearing up communities across the U.S., with heavy downpours sending creeks and rivers rushing over their banks from Texas to Kentucky, across the Midwest and into the Mid-Atlantic states and the Northeast.

Texas’ Hill Country was hit hard again when a powerful storm triggered flooding on the Guadalupe and other rivers on July 16, 2026, in the same region where more than 100 people, including young campers, died in flash flooding on July 4, 2025. In Missouri, floodwater swept away a home, and National Guard helicopters had to rescue and evacuate dozens of people from a summer camp.

If this feels like déjà vu after two summers of flash flooding across America, imagine being a community that has had to live through flooding like this again and again.

Residents in Cocke County, Tennessee, were still recovering from the effects of Hurricane Helene’s deadly 2024 rush of mountain floodwater when a new storm turned creeks into raging rivers in June 2026. Officials in Tioga County, Pennsylvania, had been lobbying the state to dredge flood-prone streams before flash flooding in early July 2026 hit the same communities flooded by Hurricane Debby’s remnants two years earlier.

As storms intensify in our warming world, recovery no longer feels permanent in places at risk of disasters. Instead, it’s too often a temporary reprieve before the next disaster hits. Communities are also spending down their savings to rebuild, and they’re finding bank accounts thin when disaster strikes again.

This state of repeated disasters is known as disaster fatigue. As a researcher who works on disaster planning and recovery, I’ve seen how this problem has grown for residents and communities at risk of fires, floods, hurricanes or other natural disasters.

When recovery never really ends

The traditional disaster response model assumes a sequence of preparedness, response, recovery and, eventually, a return to stability.

However, a full recovery from major flooding or a hurricane takes years. Increasingly, communities might not have completed repairs before another damaging storm arrives. At the same time, families rebuilding after a hurricane may confront a housing shortage. Insurance and reconstruction costs rise. Businesses and their workers face economic uncertainty about how soon they can reopen. Farmers recovering from drought may face another season of extreme weather before their livelihoods are restored.

The same pattern can be seen beyond weather-related disasters. In Venezuela, powerful earthquakes in 2026, followed by aftershocks, occurred within a broader context of economic and humanitarian challenges, making recovery even more complex.

In many places, recovery is no longer a destination. It has become an ongoing and seemingly unending process.

Emergency management scholar Victoria Ingham and colleagues define community disaster fatigue as the deterioration of the community’s ability to function, its well-being and its capacity to recover when disasters repeatedly disrupt daily life and overwhelm the community’s resources. Research examining communities exposed to repeated disasters has found evidence of fraying social networks and growing strain on the government and community systems essential for recovery.

Related research on resilience fatigue among residents suggests that repeated exposure to hazards can produce physical and emotional exhaustion, anxiety about future disasters and frustration associated with the constant effort required to return to normal.

Compounding disasters

Part of the challenge is that disasters increasingly do not occur in isolation.

Researchers and emergency managers often talk about these risks as cascading and compounding disasters. A flood doesn’t just damage roads; it also disrupts healthcare access, interrupts supply chains and creates long-term economic hardship. At the same time, communities may be dealing with extreme heat and housing shortages.

Flooding from Missouri to New Jersey in mid-July 2026. ABC News.

Climate change is contributing to many of these patterns. Heavy precipitation, extreme heat, drought and other weather-related hazards are occurring more frequently in many regions.

For communities already trying to manage a recovery, each new event adds another layer of disruption and costs.

Hidden costs of repeated recovery

One of the most important consequences of repeated disasters is the strain on social cohesion – the relationships and networks that help communities share information, coordinate resources and support one another during difficult times. Volunteers who repeatedly respond to emergencies may experience burnout.

Research examining disaster fatigue among community leaders found that people reported feeling exhausted and overwhelmed by the many decisions, lack of resources and other challenges associated with managing repeated emergencies over time.

Residents, too, can become exhausted by repeated evacuations and rebuilding cycles. Research on mental health after disasters shows that prolonged recovery demands, housing instability and uncertainty about the future can contribute to anxiety, depression and trauma-related symptoms.

Disaster fatigue does not mean weakness or failure. Communities can retain their ability to bounce back while simultaneously experiencing exhaustion. In fact, some of the most resilient communities got that way because they have had to recover from damage repeatedly.

Rethinking recovery

Repeated disasters expose weaknesses in the systems that provide aid and help with recovery, which will still be needed long after the headlines fade.

Communities often receive an immediate outpouring of support, but it can be disconnected from residents’ actual needs. Following major disasters, donations of clothing and toiletries may arrive in large quantities, yet critical needs such as housing assistance, debris removal and long-term recovery support such as childcare services or healthcare and social service support may go unmet.

Effective recovery depends not only on the generosity of the donations, but also on strategic approaches that can get the type of aid needed to the people who need it. Long-term recovery planning and coordinated recovery efforts – combining the strengths of government agencies, nonprofits, faith-based organizations and community groups – can help tap into the funding and types of assistance most needed and help communities quickly determine where the need will be greatest.

Recognizing community disaster fatigue is an important step toward building recovery systems that are as enduring as the challenges communities increasingly face.

These systems require sustained investments in people, institutions and communities. As disasters become more frequent and recovery efforts increasingly overlap with new floods, storms, heat waves, droughts and other disruptions, strengthening these systems will be crucial for successful, resilient recoveries.

This article, originally published July 13, 2026, has been updated with new flooding in Texas Hill Country. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

by Jackie Barlow and Stewart Mitchell

“We’re used to people saying ‘fuck no’ and doing it anyway.” These words were seemingly spoken by our very own Governor Gretchen Whitmer earlier this month, caught on a hot mic chatting with Oracle executive Clay Magouryk. The two were celebrating breaking ground on the controversial new AI data center in rural Saline, Michigan — currently the largest data center project in the country. Governor Whitmer is apparently happy to sell Michigan out to military tech giants OpenAI and Oracle. This is the latest in a series of data center projects being forced into communities that have made their opposition crystal clear. Michiganders are ‘fighting like hell’ because they understand exactly what is at stake; Southwest Michigan residents have already filed a class-action lawsuit for the 24/7 noise nuisance that disrupts daily life and reduces property values.

The development of AI data centers creates harm and destruction. The companies that drive this development, such as OpenAI and Palantir, have contracts with the U.S. military and government agencies like ICE. Locally, the influx of these data centers provides infrastructure for mass surveillance and diverts municipal resources. Globally, the push for data center expansion demands massive amounts of minerals and fossil fuels from resource-rich countries in the Global South, which are obtained through U.S. military intervention and U.S.-backed militia groups. As such, we as Michiganders must continue to oppose these data center projects.

The harm these data centers inflict ripples across the world. Data center development depends on imported critical conflict minerals and massive amounts of electricity generated by fossil fuels, which contribute directly to U.S.-backed conflicts and war on Venezuela, Iran, and in the Congo. Tantalum, tin, tungsten, and gold, referred to as 3TG, are essential, and their extraction is linked to financing armed groups and militias. The struggle for control over mineral-rich areas has led to prolonged violence in the DRC, contributing to millions of deaths and leaving entire regions destabilized. 

Detroit is becoming a hub for technology, manufacturing, and the military-industrial complex, where events like the annual Reindustrialize conference bring together defense contractors, surveillance firms, and policymakers to strategize a future built on automated warfare and mass data extraction. Palantir, Lockheed Martin, and Boeing attended, representing key pillars of the U.S. defense and surveillance industry. Palantir’s Project Maven and Where’s Daddy track individuals and automate kill chain recommendations with little human oversight. Lockheed Martin and Boeing produce the missiles, bombs, warcraft, and strike systems that turn algorithmic targeting into genocide.

It’s understandable that some Michiganders might think the development of AI data centers is a good thing, or at least an inevitability. Governor Whitmer, for one, claims that if Michigan does not lead the charge on these data centers, “they’ll be done elsewhere… with lower wages in a way that abuses the natural resources and jacks up energy prices.” Thus far, this seems to mean that companies that develop these data centers can receive tax breaks and circumvent public input, which sets a disadvantageous precedent. These data centers, furthermore, are not an inevitability, and they can drastically impact resource usage in their regions. At the Saline data center, even with the closed-loop cooling system to reduce on-site water consumption, water will be consumed indirectly: Increased electricity needs increase the need for water and oil consumption for local power plants. There is also no guarantee that any jobs created will be given to local residents. None of the reported advantages are worth the imperialism needed to supply resources to these data centers, nor the mass surveillance apparatus that comes with them.

Governor Whitmer’s hot mic comment confirmed what we already suspected: our voices and opposition are flat-out ignored in favor of destructive corporations. Michiganders across the state have stood up and said ‘fuck no’ to data centers and more war, yet projects keep moving forward. Residents deserve better than politicians who prioritize tech billionaires and war profiteers over their own people.

by Pradeep Krishnatray

There is a fundamental difference between the way United Nations talks about AI data centres and what the Indian government hopes to achieve through them.

This difference can best be captured between what the Secretary General Antonio Guterres recently said at London Climate Action Week about such data centres, and the vision that the Indian government’s Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) laid out in a draft policy document in 2020.

The Secretary General asked the tech firms (located mostly in US and China) to ‘come clean about the hidden environmental footprint’ of such centres. He specifically spelt out a framework for the tech firms called ‘AI Environmental Transparency Initiative’, and asked them to publicly measure and disclose their full environment impact, especially those related to carbon emissions, land and water usage.

In addition, he even called upon these firms to go completely Green by 2030. Guterres’ focus was obviously on using renewable energy and reducing the impact on environment.

As is clear, United Nations focus is not on the data centre per se, but the environmental risk and damage that they will cause.

That danger is real.

The 2026 report of the Canada-based United Nations University Institute for Water, Environment and Health (UN-IWEN), the academic arm of UN, spells it more vividly. Titled “Environmental Cost of AI’s Energy Use: Carbon, Water, and Land Footprints”, the report estimates that in 2030 AI’s water use will match the needs of 1.3 billion people, while its power use will be triple that of Pakistan, Bangladesh and Nigeria combined — countries with a total population of 650 million. If the data centres all over the world were treated as a nation, they would be the 11th largest one to consume electricity in 2025.

The same report, in fact, pointed out to the relationship between, what it calls, ‘carbon blindspot’ and water consumption. It said that should AI data centres transition to using Green Energy, their carbon emissions may come down by as much as 70 percent, but in so doing, their local water consumption will increase 30-fold.

What is perhaps not so well known is the requirement of critical minerals that AI demands. If the present trend continues, the demand for these minerals will grow up to four times of what we consume today. For instance, the demand for cobalt and lithium, both critical minerals, will shoot up by 500 percent by the year 2050.

It is the less developed countries that have surfeit of these minerals (countries such as Chile and Democratic Republic of Congo) and their extraction will lead to pollution, water contamination, exploitative practices, and health hazards. However, users of these critical minerals will be located in the more advanced world and would be immune to such devastations. Some experts have called this form of exploitation as a new form of imperialism.

India’s view of AI data centres

The Indian government’s Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) has a very different view of AI data centres than UN’s. For it, the AI data centres sit at the centre of economic sovereignty and self-reliance. Located in the larger Atmanribhar Bharat policy framework, it views the data centres as protecting the ‘digital sovereignty of the country.’

While the UN highlights the unequal global concentration of hardware and advanced computing power among a few tech firms and nations, especially US and China, MeitY wishes to manufacture its varied infrastructure locally to ensure that the data remains within India’s border.

Moreover, the United Nations is concerned about resource depletion with little or no benefit trickling down to vast numbers of the local population. MeitY, on the other hand, does not refer to any of this. Instead, it factors high energy demand into national power planning, transitioning to renewable energy (50% non-fossil capacity) and nuclear energy. It plans to provide heavily subsidised IndiaAI Compute Portal access to 10,000 and more high-powered Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) for startups and researchers.

In simple terms, the Indian government has worked out a detailed four-pronged strategy where it will act as a central aggregator and subsidiser thereby helping startups and researchers from not buying expensive hardware.

Finally, MeitY actively promotes data centre capacity through subsidies and financial incentives (as enunciated in the revised policy of 2024 and 2025). The UN, on the other hand, does not refer to subsidy or accessibility but focus on regulation of AI data centres.

Yes, there is a world of difference between the UN clarion call to rein in the runaway growth of data centres and Indian government’s rush toward joining a race it doesn’t wish to lose.

by Utkarsh Mishra

The energy transition runs on a short list of minerals that most people will never see: lithium, cobalt, nickel, copper and a cluster of rare earth elements with names like neodymium and dysprosium. Electric vehicles, wind turbines, solar panels and grid batteries cannot be built without them. Global demand for lithium is projected to rise 353 per cent between 2024 and 2040, according to UNCTAD, while the International Energy Agency projects lithium demand growing fivefold by 2040 under current policy trajectories, with cobalt and rare earth demand rising 50 to 60 per cent over the same period.

This is the mineral economy of decarbonisation, and like the oil economy it is replacing, it has a geography of extraction and a geography of consumption that rarely overlap. The communities paying the environmental and human costs of mining these minerals are, almost without exception, not the communities driving electric cars or installing solar panels.

Who Controls the Supply

The concentration of supply is severe and getting worse in some cases. The Democratic Republic of the Congo accounted for 74 per cent of global cobalt mine production in 2025, Indonesia for 67 per cent of nickel, and China for 69 per cent of rare earth mining, with China additionally dominating the refining stage for all three minerals, where most of the economic value is actually created.

This concentration is precisely what is driving the geopolitical scramble. Lithium-importing countries — the United States, the European Union, Japan, India — are racing to lock in supply through trade agreements, critical minerals partnerships, and direct investment in mines from Brazil to Chile to Zimbabwe. None of these arrangements, so far, is built primarily around protecting the people who live where the minerals are.

Congo: Cobalt and the Children in the Tunnels

Roughly 30 per cent of the DRC’s cobalt production comes from artisanal and small-scale mining — informal operations using hand tools rather than industrial machinery — and it is in this segment that the most documented human rights abuses occur. Amnesty International’s landmark 2016 investigation, conducted with the Congolese organisation Afrewatch, found children as young as seven working in cobalt mines, and traced supply chains from these mines into the products of major global electronics and battery manufacturers. Nearly a decade later, the pattern has not been resolved. A 2025 review of the literature found that children near mining areas show elevated cobalt levels in blood and DNA damage, alongside significantly reduced years of schooling compared to children elsewhere in the country.

The human cost extends beyond child labour. Communities have been displaced for copper and cobalt projects, while competition over cobalt-rich territory has fuelled conflict in eastern Congo. The M23 offensive in Goma in 2025, which killed an estimated 900 to 2,000 people, unfolded in a region central to cobalt extraction. None of this is new. It has been documented for years, yet little has changed.

Indonesia: The Nickel Boom’s Forests and Coastlines

Indonesia produces close to 60 per cent of the world’s nickel, and the expansion has been extraordinarily fast and extraordinarily damaging to the landscape it depends on. A 2025 investigation by Climate Rights International, based on interviews with 93 people living near mining and processing operations across Sulawesi and North Maluku, documented severe air and water pollution, the destruction of fishing and farming livelihoods, land grabbing, and forced relocations.

The environmental cost is impossible to ignore. Nickel mining has destroyed nearly 194,000 hectares of forest since 2000, while deforestation around smelters has more than doubled over the past decade. As forests disappear, so do natural protections against floods and landslides. Researchers have linked the spread of nickel mining to rising flooding and mudslides in affected districts, while the processing of battery-grade nickel generates toxic waste that remains poorly contained. The industry’s heavy dependence on captive coal power is also projected to cause 3,800 premature deaths and $2.63 billion in health costs by 2025.

Latin America: Lithium and the Drying of the Atacama

In the high desert plateau spanning Chile, Argentina and Bolivia — the so-called Lithium Triangle, holding an estimated three-quarters of the world’s known lithium reserves — extraction proceeds through evaporation ponds that draw enormous volumes of scarce groundwater. Lithium mining in Chile’s Salar de Atacama consumes up to 65 per cent of the region’s available water, and a 2025 analysis found that mining has driven a 30 per cent reduction in water levels in the salt flat, with documented declines in vegetation and local flamingo populations.

The Indigenous Lickanantay and Colla peoples, who have inhabited this region for over 11,000 years, depend on the same scarce water for agriculture and pastoral life that the mining operations are depleting. In January 2025, representatives of more than 200 Indigenous authorities from communities across Argentina, Bolivia, Chile and Peru gathered in Jujuy province for an Andean summit specifically addressing lithium’s impact on their lands. A coalition tracking automaker accountability, Lead the Charge, found that the average score of leading electric vehicle manufacturers on respecting Indigenous rights stood at just 6 per cent.

Whose Transition Is This?

None of this is an argument against decarbonisation. Climate change itself imposes catastrophic costs, disproportionately on the same communities — the global south, Indigenous populations, the rural poor — who are now being asked to absorb the extraction costs of the technology meant to address it. The pattern is not new; it mirrors, with some precision, the history of oil and gas extraction, where producing regions bore the environmental damage while consuming nations captured most of the economic and political benefit.

What is missing from today’s critical minerals rush is any serious international effort to ensure that the people living on mineral-rich land share in its benefits and are protected from its costs. Agreements being negotiated by the US, EU, Japan and India focus largely on securing supplies and reducing dependence on Chinese processing. Safeguards for workers, local communities and Indigenous groups remain weak, and the Lead the Charge findings suggest that voluntary commitments have done little to change conditions on the ground. A truly just transition would place labour rights, land rights and water protection at the heart of these agreements, rather than treating them as an afterthought.

The green transition has a supply chain, and that supply chain leaves real people bearing the costs. Whether the coming decade repeats the extractive history it promises to replace will depend not on technology, but on the choices governments and companies make today.

by Layne Hartsell, Max Wilbert and Ntafakabirhi-Aganze Clovis

Photo caption.  Sample of spodumene hard rock ore (Shutterstock)

by Utkarsh Mishra

India’s informal economy employs roughly 90% of its workforce, contributes about 45% of GDP, and operates almost entirely outside the reach of effective labour law. The workers who hold this economy together—in brick kilns, construction sites, and gig platforms—share one thing in common: the costs of growth are often settled through their labour, health, and security.

The Brick Kiln System

India has at least 100,000 functioning brick kilns, employing an estimated 23 million workers. The workforce is predominantly Dalit and Adivasi, drawn from some of the country’s poorest districts through a debt-bondage cycle that has changed very little across decades. Contractors advance families between ₹10,000 and ₹20,000 at the start of the season — enough to cover a wedding, a medical emergency, or a debt that spiralled. Once accepted, the advance becomes a trap. Workers are paid by the thousand bricks, not by the hour, which means the family’s only path to earning more is to work longer and involve their children.

Anti-Slavery International’s research across Punjab kilns found that 96% of brick kiln moulders had taken loans, and all had wages withheld for entire seasons lasting eight to ten months. Between 65% and 80% of children under fourteen were found working an average of nine hours a day during the summer months. One-third of all kiln site occupants are children between the ages of five and fourteen, with 80% of those children working directly in brick production alongside their parents. This is not informal employment that happens to involve children — it is a wage structure specifically designed to make child labour economically rational for families who cannot survive without it.

The physical toll of brick kiln work is immense and rarely documented. During the March–June season, temperatures often reach 45–50°C, while workers carry loads of 60–80 kilograms across uneven ground. Women face the same punishing labour as men, often while pregnant. Children inhale clay dust, carry heavy loads, and lose years of schooling. Workers frequently suffer chronic injuries and respiratory illness. Yet nearly 90% of kilns lack running water, and workers have no accident insurance, health coverage, or pension.

Brick kilns are covered by labour laws, but enforcement is weak. Owners often classify their operations as family businesses or seasonal enterprises to avoid scrutiny, while labour inspectors remain overstretched. Bonded labour is illegal in India, yet remains widespread across the sector.

Construction’s Invisible Toll

The brick kilns supply raw material to an industry that is only marginally safer. India’s construction sector is the second most hazardous industry in the country, with an average of 38 fatal accidents every day. Research by the National Institute of Technology, Surat, and IIT Delhi estimates that construction accounts for approximately 24% of all occupational fatalities in India — roughly 11,600 deaths annually out of a national total of 48,000 workplace fatalities, though these are almost certainly undercounts given how systematically the informal sector goes unrecorded.

Daily wages for unorganised construction workers range between ₹150 and ₹300, with no contracts, no job security, and no compensation when an injury permanently takes someone off the site. Only 20% of India’s workforce is covered under any existing health and safety legal framework. The remaining 80%, the vast majority of whom are women, Dalits, Adivasis, or interstate migrants, are invisible to both the law and the data.

Who Bears the Cost—and Who Fights Back

What keeps this system running is not just poverty. It is the failure of institutions that should protect workers. Labour cases drag on for years, media attention fades after disasters, and workers who protest are often treated as a nuisance rather than people with rights. Employers routinely evade responsibility: platform companies call workers “partners”, contractors shift liability through layers of subcontractors, and brick kiln owners present themselves as family enterprises. Accountability is always out of reach.

The idea holding this together is that workers freely chose these jobs and therefore accepted their conditions. But that ignores the debts, caste barriers, migration, and lack of alternatives that shape those choices. It also ignores that children never choose exploitation.

Yet workers continue to resist. In late 2025 and early 2026, gig workers, trade unions, and peasant organisations organised strikes and protests demanding fair wages, social security, and stronger labour protections. Their struggles are connected. The insecurity faced by app-based workers today—uncertain earnings, opaque penalties, and little recourse—is a newer version of what brick kiln workers have endured for generations. A delivery rider managed by an algorithm and a kiln worker tied to an advance may seem worlds apart, but both work within systems that maximise flexibility for employers while limiting accountability.

India’s gig economy already employs around 12 million workers and is expected to double by the end of the decade. Unless policies change, it will not just create more jobs. It will also expand a model that treats workers as disposable and pushes the risks of work onto them—a pattern brick kilns have relied on for generations.

The Political Economy of Bodies

The suffering that runs through India’s informal economy is not an unfortunate side effect of growth. It is part of how the system works. Brick kilns depend on cheap, unregulated labour. Construction booms are built on dangerous work sites where workers routinely risk injury and death. Platform companies promise convenience by shifting the risks of the road, accidents, and lost income onto workers themselves.

The evidence is not hidden. Government surveys, international reports, and workers’ testimonies have documented these realities for years. The real question is why we continue to treat them as problems of informality rather than as the result of an economy that relies on certain people—overwhelmingly Dalit, Adivasi, migrant, and female workers—to bear costs that others profit from.

This suffering is not an unfortunate by-product of growth. It is one of the costs on which growth depends. Every cheap brick, rapidly built tower, and ten-minute delivery relies on labour that remains largely invisible until something goes wrong. When a worker is injured, trapped in debt, or denied compensation, it is often treated as an individual tragedy rather than the predictable result of how work is organised.

India’s growth story is often told through rising skylines, expanding infrastructure, and digital innovation. Less often told is the story of the workers whose bodies bear the costs of that growth. Until those costs are recognised and shared more fairly, the question is not whether exploitation will continue, but how many more people will be asked to carry it.

by Utkarsh Mishra

There is a version of the green transition that appears in corporate sustainability reports and climate conference presentations: renewable energy scaled at speed, forests preserved through carbon markets, critical minerals extracted for batteries and turbines, a net-zero future delivered on schedule. Then there is the version unfolding across the Global South — where Indigenous communities are losing land to the same “climate solutions” celebrated in those reports, often without their knowledge and almost always without their consent.

This is not a story about people opposing climate action. It is a story about who gets to decide what climate action looks like, and who absorbs its costs.

The legal architecture that should prevent this is substantial on paper. The United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples requires Free, Prior, and Informed Consent before any development project proceeds on Indigenous territories. This applies not just to mining and dams but explicitly to climate adaptation and relocation projects. ILO Convention 169 reinforces it. Domestic constitutions in Brazil, India, Colombia, and Peru all contain provisions pointing in the same direction. The framework exists. The implementation does not.

According to the Business and Human Rights Resource Centre’s 2025 Just Transition Litigation Tracking Tool, 95 lawsuits have been filed worldwide since 2009 by Indigenous peoples, frontline communities, and workers affected by renewable energy and transition mineral projects. Indigenous peoples filed nearly half of these cases, many involving alleged violations of their rights, including the right to Free, Prior and Informed Consent (FPIC). Most lawsuits originated in Latin America and the Caribbean, while transition mineral mining accounted for over 70 per cent of cases.

These are not anti-climate lawsuits. Rather, they demand a transition rooted in dignity, equity, and respect for rights. Yet media coverage often frames such cases as resistance to climate action, overlooking concerns about lack of consultation, ancestral land rights, and the unequal distribution of benefits from green projects.

The rise in litigation points to a deeper structural problem. In the Philippines, 56 per cent of designated Competitive Renewable Energy Zones potentially overlap with ancestral domains, highlighting how the green transition is often planned around resource extraction rather than rights. Across Africa and the Americas, mining and carbon offset projects linked to the energy transition have frequently proceeded without Free, Prior and Informed Consent (FPIC), causing environmental damage, displacement, and exclusion from benefits.

This pattern is especially visible in carbon offset markets. While corporations use offsets to balance emissions through forest conservation projects in lower-income countries, the land involved is rarely empty. It is often inhabited or relied upon by Indigenous peoples and local communities. As with earlier land grabs in the Global South, inadequate consultation, poor transparency, and unfulfilled promises have fuelled grievances while undermining food security and ecosystem resilience.

Cambodia’s Southern Cardamom REDD+ project is one of the most documented examples. A Human Rights Watch report published in February 2024 documented violations of the Chong Indigenous people’s rights — community members blocked from using their traditional lands, excluded from project meetings, and threatened with arrest for farming in areas that overlapped with their pending communal land titles.

The voluntary certification schemes that corporations use to market green projects are no defence against this. Public Citizen has exposed how the Consolidated Mining Standard Initiative — a certification scheme promoted by the mining industry as evidence of “responsible” practice — allows companies to self-certify without independent assurance and makes minimal improvements on Indigenous rights standards. ESG investors receive the certification. Communities receive the project. The legal insulation flows entirely in one direction.

Large-scale reforestation and afforestation, frequently promoted as climate solutions, often involves monoculture plantations of acacia or eucalyptus — a 2019 Nature study found that 45 per cent of forestation declarations would involve monoculture plantations. These non-native trees impact entire ecosystems and have downstream negative effects on food systems, water, soil quality, and forest-dependent species. Indigenous communities watching biodiverse forests they have stewarded for generations be replaced with rows of eucalyptus — under a project that generates carbon credits for a European airline — are not witnesses to climate action. They are witnessing the latest iteration of extractive logic dressed in green language.

There are signs that courts are beginning to push back. Brazil’s Supreme Federal Court ruled in March 2025 that Indigenous peoples impacted by the Belo Monte hydropower project must receive financial benefits, and ordered Congress to pass legislation guaranteeing Indigenous participation in resource benefit-sharing within two years — a ruling explicitly applicable to existing and future projects on Indigenous lands. Countries including Kenya, Sierra Leone, and South Africa are introducing legislative requirements for FPIC and benefit-sharing across renewable energy projects. These are meaningful developments. They are also, in each case, the product of communities having to litigate for rights they were already supposed to have.

The framing problem runs deep. Climate action is treated in mainstream coverage as a category of intervention so obviously beneficial that opposition to any specific project reads as opposition to the category itself. This framing does the work of delegitimising Indigenous objections before they are examined. It also reflects whose knowledge counts in climate policy: scientists, corporations, governments, and international financial institutions design the transition; communities whose land it will be built on are notified, if they are lucky, after the decisions are made.

What would a rights-compliant green transition actually look like? The answers are neither radical nor unclear. It would require Free, Prior and Informed Consent (FPIC) to be embedded in domestic law, rather than left to voluntary corporate commitments. Certification schemes would need independent oversight and meaningful penalties for non-compliance. Climate policies and Indigenous rights protections would have to be integrated into the same legal frameworks rather than operating in separate silos. And Indigenous communities would need greater support to access justice, including funding for litigation that can help level the playing field against corporations with far deeper resources.

The United Nations has repeatedly warned that climate action designed without Indigenous peoples at its centre risks reproducing the very systems of extraction and exclusion that drove the crisis in the first place. That should be an uncomfortable message for governments, corporations, and international institutions that frame the green transition as a project of climate justice. It is not simply a warning about what could happen in the future. For the 238,000 Indigenous people who experienced land rights violations in 2024 alone, it describes a reality that already exists.

by Ranjan Solomon

The recent appeal by Goa Chief Minister Pramod Sawant to Prime Minister Narendra Modi seeking relaxation of Coastal Regulation Zone (CRZ) norms and easier sand extraction rules is not merely misguided policy. It is an alarming invitation to ecological disaster. It Is also a brand of political ecocide that the CM is pushing for without having studied the issues involved.

Presented as a practical solution to Goa’s “sand shortage,” the proposal reveals an obsolete and extractive mindset that sees rivers, estuaries, and coastlines not as living ecosystems but as warehouses of raw material for construction and profit. The request is scientifically unsound, environmentally reckless, and politically revealing. It reflects the dangerous confidence of “double-engine governance” – the belief that when the same political party controls both the State and the Centre, environmental safeguards can be bent, weakened, or dismantled in the name of development.

But rivers do not obey political slogans. Coastal ecosystems do not negotiate with electoral arithmetic. Nature eventually sends the bill for every act of ecological conceit with death and destruction.

Goa’s rivers are already under immense stress. Unregulated sand extraction would intensify erosion, destroy aquatic biodiversity, threaten agriculture, damage groundwater systems, and accelerate coastal vulnerability in a state already facing climate instability and sea-level rise. Scientists across the world have repeatedly warned that sand mining is one of the least regulated yet most environmentally destructive extractive industries on Earth.

The absurdity of the Chief Minister’s request lies not merely in what he proposes, but in the fact that scientific alternatives already exist. Instead of investing in innovation, recycling, material science, and sustainable construction technologies, the government appears determined to continue treating natural ecosystems as expendable.

Sand is not an infinite resource. Contrary to popular perception, river sand takes centuries to form through natural geological processes. Excessive extraction destabilizes riverbeds, alters water flow, increases salinity intrusion, and destroys spawning grounds for fish and crustaceans. In coastal states like Goa, the consequences are even more severe because rivers are closely linked to estuarine ecosystems, mangroves, floodplains, and coastal aquifers. When sand is removed from rivers beyond replenishment levels, the river literally begins to die.

The impacts are visible worldwide. Excessive sand mining has caused river collapse in parts of Southeast Asia, severe coastal erosion in Africa, and groundwater crises across India. The United Nations Environment Programme has repeatedly identified unsustainable sand extraction as a major environmental challenge of the 21st century. India itself has witnessed the catastrophic consequences of illegal and excessive sand mining in states like Uttar Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Kerala, and Maharashtra.

Goa cannot pretend it is immune. The state’s rivers are relatively short, ecologically fragile, and already burdened by tourism infrastructure, sewage discharge, real estate pressure, and mining legacies. The Mandovi, Zuari, Tiracol, and Sal rivers are not merely waterways; they are complex ecological arteries sustaining fisheries, mangroves, agriculture, biodiversity, livelihoods, and cultural life.

Relaxing CRZ regulations in such a context is akin to weakening the foundations of a house already showing structural cracks. The CRZ framework exists precisely because coastal ecosystems are uniquely vulnerable. These regulations were designed to balance human activity with ecological survival. To portray them as “obstacles” to development is intellectually dishonest. In reality, CRZ norms have often been the last thin line preventing indiscriminate commercial assault on India’s coastlines.

What is particularly disturbing is the political philosophy behind the demand. Instead of acknowledging ecological limits, the state government appears convinced that political proximity to the Centre can override scientific caution. This “double-engine” mentality reduces governance to bureaucratic convenience rather than constitutional responsibility.

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Goa is facing severe coastal destruction, with up to 27% (48-52 km) of its coastline affected by erosion. A shoreline study by the National Centre for Sustainable Coastal Management (NCSCM) highlights that stable coastlines have plummeted to just 14%, driven by climate change, illegal sand mining, and unregulated coastal development.

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Environmental laws are not inconveniences to be negotiated away through political networking. They exist because ecosystems have thresholds beyond which damage becomes irreversible.

One must ask: why is there such desperation for river sand in the first place? The answer lies in Goa’s aggressive construction culture – luxury housing projects, speculative real estate, tourism infrastructure, highway expansion, and urban sprawl. Vast tracts of land are being converted into concrete landscapes for private profit while ecological carrying capacities are ignored.

The state’s development model itself is the problem. Goa is being transformed from an ecologically sensitive region into a construction economy driven by short-term gains. Forests shrink, hills are cut, wetlands vanish, rivers choke, and now even riverbeds are to be mined more aggressively to feed the appetite of unchecked construction. This is not development. It is ecological liquidation.

Yet what makes the Chief Minister’s position even more indefensible is that viable scientific alternatives to river sand already exist. Manufactured sand (M-sand), produced by crushing hard rock under controlled conditions, is now widely used across the world and increasingly across India. Properly processed M-sand can match or even outperform natural river sand in construction quality. It reduces pressure on rivers and can be produced scientifically with environmental safeguards.

Similarly, construction and demolition waste recycling offers enormous potential. Demolished concrete structures can be crushed, processed, and reused in building material production. Countries facing sand scarcity have invested heavily in recycling technologies rather than destroying river ecosystems.

Why is Goa not investing aggressively in such alternatives? Why are engineering institutes, universities, environmental scientists, and material technologists not being mobilised to create sustainable construction solutions? Why is the political imagination trapped in extraction rather than innovation?

The answer, unfortunately, lies in the nature of contemporary governance. Ecological thinking requires long-term vision, scientific literacy, institutional integrity, and political courage. Extraction politics, on the other hand, offers immediate profits, contractor networks, and visible “development” narratives useful during elections. The tragedy is that environmental destruction is often politically invisible until it becomes catastrophic. By the time riverbanks collapse, saline intrusion destroys farms, fisheries decline, flooding intensifies, and groundwater becomes unusable, the damage is already embedded into the landscape for generations.

Goa has already experienced enough warnings. Flooding patterns are changing. Coastal erosion is worsening in certain stretches. Heat stress is rising. Water scarcity periodically affects villages despite abundant rainfall. Biodiversity loss is accelerating. Mangroves continue to face encroachment. Hill-cutting and concretisation are destabilising natural drainage systems. In such a situation, demanding weaker environmental safeguards is not governance. It is ecological irresponsibility masquerading as pragmatism.

There is also a deeper moral question involved. Who benefits from relaxed sand mining regulations? Certainly not ordinary Goans struggling to protect fields, fishing livelihoods, water sources, and village ecosystems. The primary beneficiaries are likely to be the construction industry, real estate interests, contractors, and politically connected networks that profit from resource extraction.

The environmental costs, however, will be socialised. Fisherfolk will face declining catches. Farmers will face salinity and erosion. Villagers will face floods and water stress. Future generations will inherit damaged ecosystems while private interests walk away with profits. This pattern has repeated itself across India.

The sand economy is notorious not merely for ecological destruction but also for corruption, criminality, and political patronage. Illegal sand mining mafias have flourished in several states, often operating with political protection. Environmental activists, journalists, and even government officials have faced intimidation and violence while exposing these networks.

Weakening safeguards in Goa risks opening the door to similar dynamics. The state should instead move in the opposite direction: strengthen monitoring systems, enforce sustainable extraction limits, expand river restoration efforts, promote recycled building materials, incentivise green architecture, and radically rethink the model of endless construction-led growth.

Goa does not need more extraction. It needs ecological intelligence.

A genuinely visionary government would have treated the sand shortage as an opportunity to invest in scientific alternatives and sustainable technologies. It would have brought together hydrologists, geologists, environmental engineers, architects, and climate scientists to create a long-term materials policy suited to a fragile coastal state.

Instead, the Chief Minister has chosen the oldest and easiest route: extract more from nature and weaken the laws that stand in the way. It is a remark on ignorance merged with arrogance and desire for development ethics and brute power.

That is not leadership. It is surrender to the politics of convenience. Modi will be asked the question. Political convenience may cause him to agree. After there is an election on the anvil. Poor political decisions may win him an election and hurt people beyond the worst. This is not an issue for politicians who do not know the subject at all. It must be left to socially conscious experts. . Politicians must be discarded from decision making. They do not own the eco-systems and have only destroyed our environment it in the name of development, and to satisfy their insatiability for resources from which they profit.

Goa’s ecosystems are not expendable collateral in the race for concrete expansion. Rivers are not mines. Coastlines are not commercial frontiers waiting to be dismantled. Environmental safeguards are not anti-development obstacles. They are society’s last defence against irreversible collapse.

If the Centre yields to this demand simply because political power aligns between Delhi and Goa, it would expose the hollowness of India’s environmental governance architecture. Science cannot be subordinated to partisan convenience without consequences. Nature ultimately has no allegiance to political parties.

And when ecosystems collapse, no “double engine” – no government with this discounted political slogan be able to reverse the damage. Generations to follow will face the grave consequences while the political class who committed the crimes of destruction will have passed.

by Mark H Burton

Image caption. image by James Baltz. Free to use under the Unsplash License

The supply chain problems arising from the unprovoked USA/Israeli attack on Iran are becoming clear. They are multiple, affecting not just oil and natural gas, 20% of which passes through Hormuz, but also the many things dependent on petroleum. The impacts have yet to be fully felt, but what the world will experience is going to be just a practice performance for a longer term and more permanent change, a slowdown that will mean a collapse in the multiple systems on which we all rely.

Systemic impacts of the Hormuz blockades

Just as the people of Vietnam fought the USA to a standstill (which led to ultimate defeat), Iran’s authoritarian government has enforced a stalemate against the bigger power, in this case by preventing ships from transiting through the Gulf of Hormuz bottleneck. The USA has compounded the problem by blockading Iran’s ports. While this impasse might end with a peace agreement, it has already, in early May 2026, led to price rises for petroleum products and multiple items, large and small, dependent on them. These rises are baked into the system for the near to medium-term future.

Petroleum

The way of life of the vast majority of humanity is now wholly dependent on petroleum: in effect, we eat it, wear it, get carried around by it, communicate through it, sit on it and medicate ourselves with it. Oil has the virtue of being a dense and transportable energy source. It is not so difficult to substitute for oil in applications such as electricity generation, although the renewable energy capture systems themselves are made and maintained by burning oil. It is far more difficult to do so in areas such as agriculture, shipping, aviation and heavy freight. There will still be oil available, but it will be more expensive if the blockades continue, since the global stockpiles will get depleted. This will increase the cost of many things, and for a country like the UK, which imports half of its food and most manufactured products, the impacts are obvious.

Oil is also vital for the manufacture of a huge variety of products. As it increases in cost, those products increase in cost. The Hormuz constriction already directly affects several critical petrochemical products, listed below:

• Inorganic fertiliser: In addition to rising oil prices, the supply shock to fertiliser will put pressure on agricultural production, with big implications for food security. Around 30% of fertilizer products go through the Strait of Hormuz. Qatar is the world’s biggest producer of urea, a key input to fertiliser manufacture. The region also produces around 35% of the urea and 23% of the ammonia, another feedstock for nitrogenous fertiliser, which is exported globally. Sulphur, another component of fertiliser manufacture, is also produced in the region as a by-product of oil production.
• Sulphur products, notably sulphuric acid, are used in a host of industrial processes, including copper and cobalt extraction.  Some 49% of the global sulphur trade passes through Hormuz.
• Plastics are made almost exclusively from petroleum fractions. To name but two types, polyester is used in clothing, and polypropylene has a huge variety of applications, from automotive plastics to rope to medical disposables.
• Pharmaceuticals: some 85% of NHS prescriptions could be affected, paracetamol and aspirin being particularly vulnerable. Life-critical cancer and stroke medications will also be affected.  NHS sources predict shortages from June 2026.

Depending on the duration of the blockades, the restriction of oil and its products will lead to a recession across the world, simply as a result of price escalation. Some areas will be affected more than others, depending on the degree of their reliance on petroleum products from the Persian Gulf.

Commentators are unified in calling this a perfect storm for the UK and world economy, and hence for livelihoods and well-being.

Peak resources, limits to growth and system collapse

The Hormuz constriction gives us an insight into a far bigger problem, the constrained nature of the resources we rely on in rich and poor countries alike.

Back in 1973, systems scientists at MIT carried out a computer simulation using a methodology called systems dynamics. They modelled several scenarios, using then current trends to identify likely patterns of key variables (population and industrialisation, pollution, resource depletion and land availability for food) over the coming decades. The modeling produced has been uncannily prescient, in that what actually happened has followed the projections with relatively minor deviations, a record superior to that of any economic forecasting. The ‘standard run’ scenario (what would happen if trends then continued) indicated a civilisational collapse, starting about now. What underpins this grim diagnosis?

As more and more people achieve higher and higher levels of affluence, they consume more and more of the world’s resources. Consumption increases each year and population growth, industrialisation, pollution, food production and resource depletion all follow an exponential growth curve. Material growth cannot continue indefinitely because the Earth is physically limited. Eventually, the scale of human activity exceeds the carrying capacity of the environment, resulting in a sudden contraction. This is ecological overshoot, and we are well into that. “This means that several of Earth’s life-supporting systems risk crossing critical thresholds, with severe consequences for both ecosystems and societies”.

Globally, we are using the equivalent of one and a half planets’ worth of the Earth’s ability to renew its resources and absorb human-generated matter, e.g. carbon emissions, every year. Indeed, 2.8 times in the case of the UK. That requires at least a 60% reduction in the size of the UK’s production and consumption footprint, and more than an 85% reduction in the case of the Nitrogen, phosphorus and Carbon Dioxide emission boundaries. What this means is that, firstly, the resources supporting humanity – food, minerals, industrial output – will begin to decline. This would be followed by a collapse in population.

It is important to understand that contraction or collapse happens, not because physical resources disappear entirely, but because the quality of some resources declines as more and more of them are extracted.  Easy to extract oil reserves, for example, are succeeded by those that require more sophisticated and costly techniques for drilling, pumping and refining.  Mineral deposits become successively less densely concentrated, requiring more energy to extract and producing prodigious mountains of spoil. It therefore requires more and more energy and investment to extract usable high-quality resources from raw materials. The same goes for energy: the key concept here is diminishing Energy Return on Investment (EROI). This diverts resources away from productive industry and agriculture, and eventually the process, and hence the system, becomes unsustainable. The resulting economic collapse is likely to precede the overall collapse of the Earth’s life systems.

Are not renewables the answer? Yes, in part, but they cannot substitute for either the scale of use or all the multiple uses of oil and other hydrocarbons.

• Firstly, obviously, you cannot make petrochemicals out of sunlight or wind.
• Secondly, industrial-scale renewables provide electricity. Despite advances in battery storage, large-scale deployment of battery storage is not feasible for heavy freight and similar uses.
• Thirdly, the increasing scarcity of critical minerals (copper, rare earths, for example) will constrain the scale of renewable energy capture systems, so they will not be able to substitute for the scale of energy currently used.
• Fourthly, the manufacture, deployment and maintenance of wind turbines, solar panels and energy storage systems are all dependent on fossil fuels.
• Fifthly, the true EROI of electricity generation by renewable energy capture systems is low. All this means that our future will be far more energy constrained than today, possibly a tenfold decrease overall.

We have been warned

Hormuz is a warning, a preview, or a dry run for what lies in store. Already, the warnings are emerging into the mainstream. In the last few months, two previously suppressed government reports have emerged. One is a national security assessment titled Global biodiversity loss, ecosystem collapse and national security, the other considers major issues in food security. The first report listed a number of startling headlines, each with a rating of the government’s confidence in the analysis given (not of the likelihood of these dire events occurring).

1. Global ecosystem degradation and collapse threaten UK national security and prosperity. High
2. Cascading risks of ecosystem degradation are likely to include geopolitical instability, economic insecurity, conflict, migration and increased inter-state competition for resources. Moderate
3. Critical ecosystems that support major global food production areas and impact global climate, water and weather cycles are the most important for UK national security. High
4. Ecosystem degradation is occurring across all regions. Every critical ecosystem is on a pathway to collapse. High
5. There is a realistic possibility that some ecosystems (such as coral reefs in Southeast Asia and forests in the very far North) will start to collapse from 2030, and others (rainforests and mangroves) will start to collapse from 2050. Low
6. All countries are exposed to the risks of ecosystem collapse within and beyond their borders.  Moderate
7. Without significant increases in the UK food system and supply chain resilience, it is unlikely the UK would be able to maintain food security if ecosystem collapse drives geopolitical competition for food. Moderate

Note again that this is not from some eco-activists but from the UK government itself.

The second report (from 2024 but which only surfaced in a Times article this year, 2026) expands on this last point. The Times article summarised the findings:

“…an expert group of civil servants, concluded that not only Britain’s food supply but also its water supply, and international trade networks, were “almost certain” to be “on a decline and collapse trajectory”, meaning there was “a realistic possibility that by 2030 (increasing to 2050) our food, water and natural ecosystems (etc.) are at strategic risk of catastrophic failure”.

Yet, despite impending crisis and collapse, the political discussion is only ever about relative trivia or the early symptoms of this ‘closing circle’. Even the Green Party leadership, in its new populist guise, backpedals on the severity of ecological overshoot and the unsustainability of economic growth.

To confront this reality means establishing several priorities, in public debate and in government action.

• A public education campaign, explaining the risks and the need for serious and rather drastic measures (just as is done in other national emergencies). The public needs to know, firstly, that the situation is critical, we are all at risk, but secondly, that we will be taken care of, and take care of one another.
• A reset of expectations: no more replacing cars every few years, jetting off on holiday, eating exotic foods out of season, buying new clothes before the others wear out. Those are examples of the changes to lifestyles of reckless yet trivial consumption that are coming and which we might as well start practising. A programme to reduce the demand for energy, meaning the insulation of all housing stock on a street-by-street basis, mass employment of efficient heat sources (heat pumps and district heating, for example), rationing of fuel and prioritisation of necessary industrial uses.
• A food security programme with a shift in agriculture from fodder crops to direct food production, entailing a much more plant-based national diet, and the stockpiling of staples on a rolling basis. The managed replacement of chemical inputs with proven organic, regenerative methods for soil fertility and pest management.
• Because measures of this sort will threaten some livelihoods, the design of social welfare programmes that are adequate to the challenge, yet affordable in the light of the very likely recession.
• Education for sufficiency: cultivation, making and repairing, and care of the earth.
• And above all, the dumping of the mantra of economic growth: growth will not be possible, and meanwhile its pursuit, because it magnifies material and energy flows, worsens the already grim situation.
• A reset of national security to focus on these real threats, emphasising civil defence, and rejecting the warmongering that is being pursued in a vain attempt to boost the economy.

Which academics, NGOs, media outlets and politicians will actually stand up to say these things?  Or are we going to go on, metaphorically blinkered and blindfolded?