In fact, the Paris Agreement only gets us about halfway globally to the carbon reductions we need to avert catastrophic warming of the planet, of two degrees Celsius or more, 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit or more. So that’s the direct effect. The indirect effect of course is that it sends the wrong message to other major players, in particular, China and India. China is the largest emitter of carbon pollution today. And by signaling a pullout from the Paris Accord, it takes off the pressure, it takes the pressure off of China to meet its commitments. And in fact, before Trump entered the picture, China was going beyond their commitments. They were actually decommissioning coal fired power plants and carbon emissions globally had leveled off, the first step in actually bringing them down, which is what we need to do.

Harvey Wasserman analyzes Trump's call for a space Force

It should be a scandal that leftists-liberals paint Trump as a special threat, a war mongerer – not Obama who is the first president to be at war everyday of his eight years, who is waging seven wars at present, who dropped three bombs an hour, 24 hours a day, the entire 2016. Here is some of the worst of this anti-Trump hysteria propagated by mouthpieces for liberal Democrats — calling Republicans “fascist” is a favorite left-liberal sport.

Both capitalism and electoral democracy impede effective climate action. But while we have to defend and transform democracy, there is no possibility that capitalism can be made compatible with either global climate mitigation or social and economic justice.

Donald Trump plans to dismantle America’s already weak climate policy, potentially dooming not only this country but the entire world to runaway greenhouse warming. The day after Election Day 2016, star climate scientist Michael Mann was already saying he feared that it was “game over” for the Earth's climate.

But at the same time Trump is taking a blowtorch to climate action, he and his allies in Washington are taking a sledgehammer to our democracy. So what do we do when we face two simultaneous emergencies: a slide toward fascism and a descent into a greenhouse climate gone haywire?

Writing recently in Monthly Review, John Bellamy Foster argued that given the threat we face, the necessary ecological-social revolution will have to be carried out in two stages, and that “The first would involve the formation of a broad alliance, modeled after the Popular Front against fascism in the 1930s and ’40s. Today’s Popular Front would need to be aimed principally at confronting the fossil-fuel-financial complex and its avid right-wing supporters.” But then, “the ecological revolution will have to extend eventually to the roots of production itself, and will have to assume the form of a system of substantive equality for all . . .”

The struggle must be taken to every front. Many continue to see the immediate struggle for civil and human rights and against fascism, racism, and economic exploitation as having top priority, given the all-out assault coming down from Washington, many state capitals, and law enforcement. Others continue to argue that we have to lead with an all-consuming effort to eliminate greenhouse emissions and ecosystem destruction if we are even to have a chance at keeping the Earth livable.

Then there are those, including those of us at Green Social Thought, who have long insisted that the two struggles be given joint top priority, because if we succeed in either one but not the other, catastrophe is unavoidable. And importantly, there is no contradiction between the two struggles; in fact, they energize each other.

Capitalism: can’t live with it, might live without it

The dramatic swerve down the road to fascism in the United States, Europe, and Russia has further hobbled our chances of prevailing in today’s struggle for democracy, humanity, and the Earth. I say “further” because the odds were stacked against us long before 2016. The chief threat was then, and still is, capitalism. A well-functioning capitalist economy depends on maintaining large, competing pools of vulnerable labor and on the continuously increasing throughput of energy and resources that feeds the climate emergency.

A few months before America’s political sinkhole opened up, Paul Cox and I put it this way in our book How the World Breaks: “From the point of view of those with vast wealth at stake, the cure for climate catastrophe—deep, ongoing restraint in production and consumption to limit greenhouse gas emissions—would be far more devastating than the worst earthquake, flood, or hurricane.” The same applies to a realignment of economic power in favor of today’s beleaguered majority.

In an article published by Nature Climate Change just fifty days after the US presidential election, two scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research concluded that if America does nothing to cut greenhouse emissions for the next four years, it is still possible that the Earth can avoid runaway warming, but only if we do launch drastic actions immediately after that hiatus, and only if the rest of the world ignores our slacker example and starts meeting its climate obligations immediately. That means our chances of maintaining a livable planet are clearly very slim. But they're not zero.

Also in December, Yale economist William Nordhaus published a paper in which he metamorphoses before our eyes from one of the world’s foremost climate optimists into a deep pessimist. Having updated his world economy/climate model with assumptions reflecting the new climatic reality, Nordhaus found that an “optimized” economy (one that, through cost-benefit analysis, carefully balances greenhouse emissions cuts with the need for economic growth) can now be expected to blow through the much-discussed 1.5-degree rise in world temperatures (a widely accepted threshold for global disaster) by 2030 and hit a cataclysmic 3.5 degrees by 2100. (Mann says we have already hit 1.5 degrees.)

More aggressive climate mitigation scenarios that could eliminate net greenhouse emissions by 2040 and keep the temperature rise down to a still-dangerous 2.5 degrees were characterized as “unrealistic” by Nordhaus. So in an eminent economist’s view, capitalism is incompatible even with climate strategies that would reduce emissions but still usher in runaway warming. (Economists would presumably view as worse than unrealistic a detailed, highly practical plan to keep the rise below 1.5 degrees that was modeled on the U.S. mobilization for World War II and published by The Climate Mobilization.)

Nordhaus’s conclusion is not the kind of thing climate optimists like to hear, especially now that they are under assault from retrograde climate deniers at the very top of the power structure. Back when technocrats were still in power, Paul and I characterized what we saw as optimists’ unrealistic view of climate catastrophe this way: “Disaster could be domesticated, soaked up by the economy, so we the people could all experience the event as something distant and manageable, canceled out on future balance sheets by its silver linings. . . . This type of optimism is, we believe, what we will have to worry about when we don’t have to worry about climate change denial anymore.”

What we didn’t know back then was that from 2017 onward, we’re still going to have to worry about climate denial and many more dangers all at once. For years to come, as seas rise and landscapes shrivel, America could remain immobilized within the iron triangle of climate denial, climate optimism, and economic “realism.”

Democracy: might not live with it, can’t live without it

It has been obvious for more than four decades that we can have either capitalism or a livable planet but not both. We’ve known even longer that we can have either capitalism or economic and social justice but not both. For most of us, there’s no dilemma there; only for capitalists themselves does the need to preserve capitalism warrant ruining the Earth for human habitation or having the majority of our fellow human beings live in misery. But in coming years we will have to face a question that should terrify us all: have we reached the point at which we can we have either effective climate action or representative democracy but not both?

With every updated run of global climate models, it becomes clearer that only an immediate, steep decline in greenhouse emissions can give us even a fighting chance to avoid catastrophic warming. That will require a hard ceiling on fossil-fuel burning and other emission-generating activities, a ceiling that must be ratcheted down year by year. In a further tightening of the belt, a big slice of that declining resource budget will have to be set aside for building renewable energy generation capacity and other emission-reducing infrastructure. These moves will constitute a rationing of production.

Struck by this one-two punch—the ceiling on resource use and the diversion of much of what’s left into green conversion—the economy will see an inevitable decline in production of consumer goods and services.

Most of the past year’s proposals for a World War II-style climate mobilization are based on a comparison involving only the second punch, that is, a parallel between the walling-off of resources and human power for war production in the 1940s and the necessary walling-off of resources for renewable energy development now. The consequences of that wartime mobilization—most prominently, conversion from civilian to military production and rationing of consumer goods—were broadly accepted by an electorate that was facing an existential threat. American democracy rose to the occasion. Presumably, we could handle a green conversion of similar scale today, were it to be attempted.

The parallel between climate and World War II mobilizations breaks down, however, back on the first punch, with the immediate, steep decline in fossil-fuel use that is necessary to prevent climatic calamity. In the 1940s, by contrast, America had enough resources and pent-up industrial capacity to boost total production and achieve full employment and higher wages. For the sake of fairness, civilian consumption had to be limited by rationing, and there were shortages of some imported items, but people knew that those conditions were temporary, and consumption soared once the war ended.

Now imagine an America of the 2020s that is weighing whether, better late than never, to declare a climate emergency that includes the necessary steep decline in emissions, production, and material consumption. If that succeeds, it will mean that (1) a majority of politicians have turned their backs on Big Business and have committed to severe limits on resource use and (2) American voters are willing to support them in that effort.

But in a society designed so that its basic working parts are individuals, each acting to their personal benefit, a candidate doesn’t get into office by telling voters what is essential for the common good. You get in by promising voters that they will be harmed personally if your opponent wins but that each voter will benefit personally if you are elected.

So if you’re a candidate wanting effective climate action, you might declare in a stump speech, “If you folks elect my opponent, the consequences will be terrible. Within a couple of decades, millions of people around the world will have lost their homes to flooding, and others will be going hungry because of crop failures.” So far, so good. Voters may think to themselves, “Oh, we wouldn’t want to see that.”

But then you continue: “On the other hand, if you elect me, there will be a much narrower range of goods available to you, and you will be buying a lot less. You will have a smaller house and will be tightly limited in how much you can drive and fly, and you can forget about that new boat. Don’t worry; the government will ensure that you have access to sufficient food, basic goods, a cleaner, healthier world, and your Constitutional rights, but a large share of the nation’s resources will have to go toward building up our renewable energy capacity and reworking our infrastructure—not into the consumer economy. And we’ll never go back to today’s levels of production and consumption.” At that point, you might as well step from behind the lectern, turn around, bend over, and moon the audience. You’re sunk.     

Given that, given our history, and especially considering our recent experience, getting American voters to approve sweeping climate policies is a hard thing to imagine. That has led some (including me at times) to wonder if saving the climate is even possible in our electoral system. But we simply cannot afford to indulge in that sort of speculation. We have no choice but to reject and condemn any calls to jettison our democratic institutions, however inadequate they are. On the contrary; we must first defend democracy against the current authoritarian onslaught and then set about transfoming it.   

Both our form of government and our economic system are throwing hurdles up between us and climate action, but while we can work to improve and transform politics, there is no possibility that capitalism can be made compatible with global climate mitigation and justice. We have to use what’s left of our democracy (inside and especially outside of electoral politics) to simultaneously fight the fascism that threatens humanity and the capitalism that threatens the Earth as a whole.

Stan Cox (@CoxStan) is an editor of Green Social Thought and author of Any Way You Slice It: The Past, Present, and Future of Rationing. Write to him at cox(at)howtheworldbreaks.com.

Lying in bed Superbowl Sunday night, I saw the news of the spectacular win by the Patriots. Dozing off, I mused: Wouldn't it be a SuperDuperBowl if the “Patriots” played a team called the “Traitors?” But who would dub themselves “Traitors?”

I drifted into the strangest dream.

Donald Trump was surrounded his coterie. “I want to bring back Trump University with a football team,” bellowed the great leader. “We'll buy the best players in the country and win the Superbowl! All we need is a little jingle for the cheerleaders. What about this:”

Get lost Muhammad,

Juan, and María,

Go starve or get shot.

We don't want to see 'ya.

“Sorry, sire,” Mike Pence apologized. “The Superbowl is for professional teams and that leaves Trump U out.

“Then I'll make a proclamation. I will decree that college teams can pay players anything they want. They won't even have to take courses – they can just pretend they are studying and still get paid. And if the team has enough money, it can buy into any league it wants.”

“Such brilliant legal insight!” congratulated Neil Gorsuch. “If there is a court challenge, just say it's not much different from what college sports already do.”

“I don't know.” Betsy DeVos had a worried look. “Educational institutions should be positive and emphasize their strong points. This is my thought:”

We're the best

'cause we're so white.

Go Trump U;

and fight, fight, fight.

“That is so good,” Melania chimed in. “When the cheerleaders chant it, make them show their respect for white womanhood. They should wear pussycat tails.”

“Don't forget spirituality,” Pence butted in. “Here's something with a little 'Onward Christian Soldiers' theme for the Trump team:”

Kick 'em in the nuts;

stomp 'em in the face.

We will win this game

with God's almighty grace.

“No, no, no,” objected DeVos. “It's not enough to praise the Almighty. The cheerleaders must chastise the inferior at the same time. Maybe…”

We hate the nigger.

We hate the jew.

If you don't love Jesus,

we'll hate you, too.

“That's divine!” Pence clasped his hands together. Without moving his head, he turned his eyes to the heavens, whispering softly, “It unites   our faith in God with our feelings about being the master race. We can finally express our true feelings. And we will have a football team whose every play will be designed by God.”

“It's settled then,” Trump announced. “You are fantastic people, truly fantastic. We will buy a team. We have a cheerleader yell. What can our mascot be? Let's think. We hate the old who need social security. We hate the sick who need Medicare. We hate women who need an abortion. We hate everyone who believes in evolution or climate change or doesn't like fossil fuels or nuclear power. We hate immigrants, the backward races, and everyone from the Middle East and Asia and Latin America. We hate Americans with physical disabilities and mental disabilities and those who are just different. They are all losers.”

He paused, thinking of anyone he might have overlooked. “We hate Americans who are over-educated and the ones who are under-educated. And we hate the queer, the faggot, the dyke, the bisexual, the transgender and any American who has copulated in an unauthorized position.”

“I think you have them,” Gorsuch nodded. “Remind me again why we hate so many Americans.”

Trump shot a reptilian stare. “We hate so many Americans because we hate America itself. That's it,” he roared, pounding the table with both fists. “That's our mascot. We'll be the 'Traitors!' The 'Hate-Every-American-Traitors.' The Trump University Traitors.”

Pence jumped on the presidential desk, shrieking “Trump, God and country – in that order!”

Trump moaned, “Protect out precious bodily fluids.”

Melania purred, “O-o-o-h Mr. President. I want to model a pussycat tail.”

The image began to fade as wakefulness crept in and I realized it was only a dream. “How could anything that weird seem so real?” I asked. Nothing like that could actually happen.

Don Fitz is on the Editorial Board of Green Social Thought, which is sent to members of The Greens/Green Party USA. He produces the show Green Time in conjunction with KNLC-TV in the City of St. Louis. He can be reached at fitzdon@aol.com

A Lakota prophecy tells of a mythic Black Snake that will move underground and bring destruction to the Earth. The “seventh sign” in Hopi prophecy involves the ocean turning black and bringing death to many sea-dwelling creatures. It doesn’t take an over-active imagination to make a connection between these images and oil pipelines and spills.

It’s troubling enough that the growing “Black Snake” has branched out at an alarming rate, forming a massive subterranean coast-to-coast web. But to make matters worse, the nefarious reptile seems to suffer from leaky gut syn­drome, so that it functions as a toxic underground sprinkler sys­tem, spreading gas, oil, and poi­sonous byproducts everywhere it goes—including into waterways and drinking water sources.

Protest actions against major pipelines such as the Keystone XL and Dakota Access Pipeline have called attention to the potentially devastating effects of pipelines, but much of the gen­eral public still doesn’t understand the scope of the existing and pro­posed pipeline network in the US and around the globe. Executive actions by Donald Trump just four days into his presidency practically guarantee expedited approval for DAPL, as well as for Keystone XL. This indicates, among other things, that the maze of oil and gas pipelines in the US will continue to expand at an unprecedented and reckless pace.

The US is already home to approximately 2.5 million miles of underground gas and oil pipeline. For the sake of comparison, only one other country exceeds 100,000 pipeline miles: Russia, with 161,502 miles. Canada places third, with just over 62,000 miles of pipeline, and all other countries fall far below that, with most containing fewer than 10,000 pipeline miles.

Over 72,000 miles of the US conduits carry crude oil, and more than 20 pipelines di­rectly threaten Native lands. The reach of the “Black Snake” is mind boggling, especially considering that every one of these pipelines has already contributed to or is al­most certain to contribute to the on­going devas­tation of Mother Earth.

Effectively opposing new pipe­lines and pipeline extensions will require the active participation of thou­sands, if not millions, of deter­mined citizens. Water is necessary for the life of every person on the planet, and the seriousness of the current situation compels each and every one of us to become involved to the greatest extent feasible.

The Dakota Access Pipeline remains a serious threat, not only to the water supply and sa­cred lands of the Standing Rock Sioux, but to all waterways and lands along the pipeline’s 1,200-mile path through North Dakota, South Dakota, Iowa, and Illinois. This monstrosity is an environmen­tal disaster waiting to happen. The heroic water protectors at Standing Rock have achieved much, but now the ground they’ve gained must be fought for all over again. With the stroke of a poisonous presidential pen, Trump has already managed to betray both long-standing treaty and recent agreement, bringing dishonor and disgrace on the US government while jeopardizing water supplies and planetary well-being.

There are a number of other significant pipeline battles that must be fought with the same tenacity that the water protectors have shown at Standing Rock, including the Mountain Valley Pipeline, the Diamond Pipe­line, the Atlantic Sunrise expansion to the Transco Pipeline, the Trans­mountain Pipe­line expansion, the Bayou Bridge Pipeline, the Pilgrim Pipeline, the Trans-Pecos and Co­manche Trail Pipelines, the Algo­nquin Incremen­tal Pipeline, the Al­berta Clipper pipeline expansion project, North­ern Gateway Pipe­line, and more. Some of these projects involve the transport of natural gas, while oth­ers will carry refined or crude oil—including the particularly filthy Bakken oil.

The proposed Mountain Valley Pipeline (MVP), which has an an­ticipated construction start date of mid-2017, will—if allowed to pro­ceed—carry fracked natural gas from the Marcellus and Utica shale regions along a route beginning in northwestern West Virginia and ending in southern Virginia, with a detour into Pennsylvania. Objec­tions to the project include the con­duit’s proximity (one-tenth of a mile in some places) to two major water supplies and countless resi­dential wells. The MVP would cross 377 bodies of water, the Ap­palachian Trail and the Blue Ridge Parkway, and could adversely af­fect thousands of acres of forest habitat.

The Diamond Pipeline, which was approved in August of 2016, is intended to transport “sweet” crude oil from Cushing, Oklahoma, across Arkansas, to the Valero Memphis (Tennessee) Refinery. Along the way, the Diamond will cross the Arkansas River, the Illi­nois Bayou, the White River, St. Francis River, and the Mississippi River.

One of the most disturbing as­pects of the Diamond Pipeline is its point of origin. Cushing, Okla­homa, is the self-proclaimed “Pipe­line Crossroads of the World,” a ti­tle proudly announced on signs placed at the entrances and exits to the town, which was once a part of the Sac and Fox reservations. The “tank farm,” which occupies sev­eral square miles, is one of the largest oil storage facilities in the world, and thirteen major pipelines run into and out of the busy hub.

As if pipeline leaks and spills weren’t enough cause for concern, the area surrounding Cushing has recently become in­credibly earth­quake prone, thanks to the large number of waste-water injection wells. The US Geologi­cal Survey reports 825 earthquakes of a 1.5 magnitude or greater in the Cush­ing area between January 14, 2016 and the same date in 2017, with an alarming 5.8 record-setter in nearby Pawnee in September 2016. If Ar­kansas water protectors do not suc­ceed in halting construction, the Dia­mond Pipeline will add one more spoke to Cushing’s mammoth oil storage hub, and will become a major conduit spreading pollution and potential devastation across Ar­kansas, a state that has for years been promoted as “the Natural State.”

Each of the planned, proposed, and under-construction pipelines listed above is deserving of strong opposition, as are the many other pipelines still in the planning and approval stages. Why? Because they are dangerous, as evidenced by the number of leaks, spills, and explosions.

In the six-year period between 2010 and 2016, 4,215 pipeline inci­dents occurred. The Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration reports that pipeline accidents between 2010 and 2015 were responsible for a to­tal of 7 million gallons of crude oil being leaked into surrounding soil and waterways, and the as-yet-un­tallied quantities lost in 2016 and early 2017 incidents will add significantly to that total. Many of the existing pipelines are old and poorly main­tained, and for some reason, the newer pipelines are even more ac­cident prone.

Human error causes some of the pipeline accidents, while natural occurrences are re­sponsible for oth­ers. In 2013, for example, lightning struck a pipeline in North Dakota, causing 840,000 gallons of crude oil to spill onto a nearby wheat field. One wonders what will hap­pen when the ongoing swarm of fracking-related Okla­homa earth­quakes damages the Cushing oil storage tanks or the pipelines con­nected to the facility.

Oil pollutes the water and land, sickens, and kills. Natural gas con­tributes to climate change, pol­lutes the air, and explodes. Oil and gas pipelines create temporary jobs for a relative few and permanent jobs for a small handful.

In the long run, the only people who benefit fi­nancially from the “Black Snake” are the already wealthy oil corpora­tions. The oil industry gives new meaning to the term “filthy rich,” while individuals living near petro­chemical plants contend with chronic respiratory illnesses and high rates of cancer. With so many clean, green energy sources ready to be put into place, there is no reason to allow the Lakota leg­end of the planet-de­stroying Black Snake to become a permanent and fatal reality.

The turnaround will not hap­pen easily. In fact, it will be quite a struggle. Greed is strong, and the oil corporations wield un­reasonable power—and now they have even more friends in high places, including the one who may as well be referred to as the CEO of the USA. But the previous halting of the Keystone XL, and the tenuous and seemingly temporary victory at Standing Rock have proven that it is indeed possible to make a difference with determination and solidarity.

The frightening number of proposed pipelines and the fact that those pipelines will likely receive swift approval make it clear that the battle for Mother Earth is indeed a war. This war cannot be won by an unknown, faceless “them,” because there is no “them.” There is only us, and each and ev­ery one of us is needed—now.

Teressa Rose Ezell is a St. Louis writer and ac­tivist. She and her fam­ily live in the Tower Grove South neighbor­hood, where she was her district's Green Party candidate for the Mis­souri House of Representa­tives. Teressa can be reached at teres­sa.rose.ezell@gmail.com, or connect via Facebook.

Mark Harris speculates that the recent Women's March on Washington, as well as its' sister marches in other cities, is the beginning of a successful movement against capitalism in the US.