by Ann Garrison

“Unspeakable riches have brought the people of the Congo little other than unspeakable pain.” So writes Siddharth Kara in Cobalt Red, How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives . Kara surrounds his subject—artisanal cobalt mining in the Democratic Republic of the Congo—with broad historical and economic context. He explains battery technology and the global dominance of battery manufacture by South Korean, Japanese, and, most of all, Chinese industrial titans. Equally predatory Western industrial titans sold cobalt mines to their Chinese counterparts, in one significant instance brokered by none other than Hunter Biden.  “In 2010,” Kara recounts, “there were only 17,000 electric vehicles on the road in the entire world. By 2021, that number had skyrocketed to 16 million. Meeting the ambitions of the Paris Agreement would require at least 100 million total electric vehicles in use by 2030.

by Hayleigh Evans

Two Arizona tribes filed a lawsuit against the U.S. Department of the Interior and the Bureau of Land Management for approving a high-voltage transmission line, alleging the government failed to account for historic and cultural sites through the line’s San Pedro Valley route. Fifty miles of the transmission line will traverse the middle and lower San Pedro Valley, which has ecological and historical values that Indigenous tribes and conservation groups hope to protect.  The Biden administration has described the $11 billion transmission line as a “game-changer” for America’s transition to clean energy.  In a 2022 environmental impact statement, the BLM found SunZia could accelerate habitat loss, affect conditions for migratory birds and remove riparian vegetation used for habitat and food for wildlife.  The riparian area is home to more than 60 mammal species, 14 fish species and 41 reptile and amphibian species, some of which are endangered or threatened.

by Andrew Curry

There was an article in Nature from late 2022 on degrowth that got some sudden attention over the holidays because economists and tech bros noticed it and turned out on social media to do some hating. In fact the lead author, Jason Hickel, claimed on Ex-Twitter that as a result the paper was the most-read on Nature during the break.  They argue that there are five principles that a “degrowth society” needs to be organised around:  Reduce less-necessary production;  Improve public services; Introduce a green jobs guarantee;  Reduce working time, and Enable sustainable development.

by Dr Marwan Asmar

Over 1000 children in Gaza have had their limbs amputated without anaesthesia. It’s a doctor’s nightmare with little medical supplies.  The number has just been released by UNICEF, the UN children’s agency and points to the devastating situation of children in Gaza.  A doctor amputated his son’s limb without anaesthesia. The pain was so sever the son couldn’t take it and died. More than 75 per cent of those killed – over 60,000 – in Gaza are women and children.  Then there is the case of the doctor who amputated the limb of his niece on the kitchen table by a knife. It was a below-the-knee operation done without anaesthesia. It’s horrendous coming out of a true horror story with over 10,000 children dead by Israeli gunfire  since 7 October.

by Bruce E. Levine

Historically, there have always been some patients who report that any treatment for depression—including bloodletting—has worked for them, but science demands that for a treatment to be deemed truly effective, it must work better than a placebo or the passage of time without any treatment. This is especially important for antidepressant drugs because all of these drugs have uncontroversial troubling side effects.  Researchers have long known that any single antidepressant drug is little more effective than a placebo in the majority of trials, shown to be less effective than a placebo in some studies, and generally found to be “clinically negligible” with respect to depression remission.

by Richard Heinberg & J. David Hughes

Confusion sometimes results from failure to distinguish production capacity from actual generation since solar and wind installations typically generate only 20 to 50 percent of their theoretical capacity.  To reach net zero emissions by 2050 by providing 100 percent of total global energy from renewables, we would need a nearly ten-fold increase in renewable energy production, even assuming zero growth in overall global energy demand during that time.  Mechanized technologies for carbon capture and storage (CCS) and direct air capture (DAC) that would be required to do this have been criticized as being too expensive, too energy intensive, and underperforming in terms of their goal.  The likelihood of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (the goal stated in the Paris Accords of 2015) is now extremely remote. Indeed, that threshold may be exceeded within just the next few years.

by Chris Hedges

Israel’s lebensraum master plan for Gaza, borrowed from the Nazi’s depopulation of Jewish ghettos, is clear. Destroy infrastrutrue, medical facilities and sanitation, including access to clean water. Block shipments of food and fuel. Unleash indiscriminate industrial violence to kill and wound hundreds a day. Let starvation — the U.N. estimates that more than half a million people are already starving — and epidemics of infectious diseases, along with the daily massacres and the displacement of Palestinians from their homes, turn Gaza into a mortuary.  The Nazis shipped their victims to death camps. The Israelis will ship their victims to squalid refugee camps in countries outside of Israel.  This is the plan. No one, especially the Biden administration, intends to stop it.  Germany’s long relationship with Israel, including paying over $90 billion since 1945 in reparations to Holocaust survivors and their heirs, is not about atonement, as the Israeli historian Ilan Pappé writes, but blackmail.

by Lylla Younes

For the second year in a row, world leaders met in the Arab world to negotiate the future of the planet. As a backdrop to the United Nations climate conference in Dubai, it’s a fitting venue for a planet-wide shift that scientists say needs to happen: The region has extensive deposits of oil and gas, but also immense, untapped potential for renewable energy.  Activists and locals worry that the flurry of new mega-projects will reproduce the same exploitative practices associated with the fossil fuel industry: land grabbing, unchecked pollution, and the disenfranchisement of Indigenous people.  Given these challenges, what might a shift away from fossil fuels look like in the Arab world, one that distributes the benefits across the population, and what might other countries stand to learn from it?

by Kohei Saito

What kinds of measures are you taking, personally, to prevent global warming?  Do you carry a thermos so you don’t end up buying drinks in plastic bottles? Did you buy an electric car?  These good deeds are meaningless. They can even cause more harm than good.  Simply thinking that such actions are effective countermeasures can prevent us from taking part in the larger actions that are actually necessary to combat climate change. They function like Catholic indulgences, allowing us to escape the pangs of our conscience via consumerism and to look away from the danger around us, allowing the forces of capital to swaddle our concerns in environmental impact statements and tuck them away beneath the form of deception known as greenwashing.  To determine how to face this threat, we must trace the current climate crisis to its root cause: capitalism.

by by Charlotte Dennett

Why would Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the Biden administration risk their standing in the world and ignore calls for a ceasefire? Did they have an unspoken agenda?  As  a chronicler of the endless post-9/11 wars in the Middle East, I concluded that the end game was likely connected to oil and natural gas, discovered off the coast of Gaza, Israel and Lebanon in 2000 and 2010 and estimated to be worth $500 billion. The discovery promised to fuel massive development schemes involving the US, Israel, and Saudi Arabia.  In the summer of 2014, Netanyahu launched an invasion of Gaza with the aim of uprooting Hamas and ensuring Israeli monopoly over the Gazan gas fields, killing 2,100 Palestinians, three-quarters of them civilians.  Netanyahu has succeeded in averting questions about how Israel’s much vaunted security apparatus could have been taken by surprise by the Hamas attack of October 7, 2023.  He had a pretext for justifying Israel’s latest and most brutal invasion of Gaza.